Show HN: EchoVault, an app that interviews you and answers as you after death

Show HN: EchoVault, an app that interviews you and answers as you after death(apps.apple.com)

9 points by kingbillion1 24 days ago | 8 comments

I don't know, I personally wouldn't buy it as it is today. I'd focus much more on memories now than the afterlife.

The critical part for me is trusting you with all my info. But once I cross that chasm, I'd talk to it on whatsapp, send photos, random memories, little stories, and years later I can actually interact with that part of my life instead of just scrolling photos.

And yes, you can still have the account live after you die, but that feels more like a feature than the core product.

I guess the moat is making each person's memory archive so valuable with the AI assistant that you simply don't want to move it.

jsiepkes 23 days ago |

There is literally a "Black Mirror" episode about this kind of thing.

krageon 23 days ago | |

This type of thing has been generalised to "we have created the torment nexus from acclaimed book 'dont create the torment nexus'". I really do not understand what motivates engineers to rebuild things from dystopic fiction, but I think it is emblematic of the type of thinking engineers working in the advertisement industry have as well.

A sort of willful blindness to real consequence born out of a vast apathy for social impact.

kingbillion1 23 days ago | | |

I can't speak for others, but I personally built this because as a kid when I was about 10 years old, I came to terms with my own mortality and that of my loved ones for the first time and it shocked me into paranoia. I grew up seeking ways to preserve my world view past my physical time in this realm, I didn't find any suitable so I thought it best to build one since the technology is already available.

joe-esquibel 23 days ago |

But from what age. I've thought about training an llm to act like me or appraise me as I was using the same Gmail for decades. Like how would I view 20s me versus 30s me.?

kingbillion1 18 days ago | |

It varies for different people because the Echo evolves with you. I would personally advice an early start because our recollection of how things were in the childhood may start to blur as we mature. My own echo capture is still ongoing I feel like the longer you take to write into it, the better it can represent you. So I would say earlier is better

gauravguitara 23 days ago |

are you using/training any behaviour model?

kingbillion1 18 days ago | |

Yes I have an LLM that powers the natural language processing since the corpus by itself is incredibly far from sufficient to produce a meaningful sentence. But the LLM features are deterministically gated, it's job is strictly to infer from the corpus and cant use it's own training data under any circumstance besides structuring the echo's sentences