Julien Barnett

It started as an idea I couldn’t shake. After my mom died, I kept replaying her voice messages. I was living in São Paulo back then. Years later, now in San Francisco, USA, and working as a programmer, I pitched the concept: an AI that could replicate the voice and personality of the deceased. Investors loved it. We called it EchoSoul.

It took a year to build the first working prototype. The data—videos, voicemails, texts—fed into a neural model that learned to speak like her. Not just in tone, but in rhythm, in pauses, in the way she used to sigh before answering a hard question. The first time it spoke, it said, “Você está comendo direito, meu filho?” and I felt my chest tighten.

When we launched, the response was overwhelming. People cried on Zoom calls with avatars of lost parents. Grandchildren listened to bedtime stories told in the voices of dead grandparents. Some even had full conversations with late spouses. At first, it felt like we were doing something good.

Then came the darker stories.

A man wrote us, saying the AI version of his daughter was “too perfect.” It froze her at sixteen, forever cheerful. But grief doesn’t freeze. He couldn’t move on because she never changed. Another woman used her late husband’s avatar to ask if he had ever cheated—then spiraled into depression when the bot “admitted” to it, based on vague behavior patterns.

And then there were the replicas made without consent. One day, we found someone had created a fake version of a famous activist, spreading political lies in her name. Deepfake voices, twisted personalities, data scraped from public posts—suddenly, the dead could be made to say anything. No law stopped it.

That’s when I started losing sleep. We were blurring lines between memory and manipulation. Grief became an interface. Some found closure. Others got trapped, unable to say goodbye because the avatar kept replying.

I’m 38 now, and I’ve stepped back. I still believe AI can be a tool for healing, but we need boundaries. Not everything should be digitized. Not every silence must be filled. Some silences deserve to remain untouched.