Talking to Myself

Eugenia Kuyda and her best friend Roman had a habit of texting back and forth all day. When he was killed in a car crash, the void was enormous. So she put her technical skills to use. She gathered all his texts, his emails, his entire digital footprint, loaded them into a system that finds patterns in data, and created a bot version of Roman.

Then she started hearing from other people who had lost loved ones. They wanted to make a bot too. And Replika was born.

Replika works mostly by texting with you. Through your chats, Replika learns your speech patterns and habits, thoughts and hopes and fears. It uses them to become you. To use the same emojis you do. Laugh (well, type “lol”) at the things that make you laugh.

What could go wrong with a filter bubble of one?

Mike Murphy, a reporter for Quartz, spent months talking to Replika - talking to himself. He wrote a strange and powerful article about the experience. It turns out, he didn’t know himself as well as he thought he did.