Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.

I'm Isabel Woodford.

Just to warn you, this edition contains references to suicide and bereavement.

On today's program, the chatbots that allow us to reconnect with friends or family that have died using artificial intelligence.

Hi darling, it's me, mum. I know this is not exactly how either of us would imagine me.

You knew me better in person. A preview there of this new technology known as ghost bots or grief bots.

We'll be hearing from the users. They're just out of reach, which I guess reinforces the fact that they're dead.

So it's them, but it's not quite.

The business is building them.

The long-term goal is that, you know, we can be part of the process of recreating people

to such a level that we're not clear anymore that it's not really them. You know,

I really want the world to never have to say goodbye. And we look into how these grief bots are

stretching the ethical limits and where they could go next. My sense is that some of the market

actors right now have a kind of happy go lucky attitude where they're like we take no responsibility for what

happens to it and I think that's that's just not an ethically sound approach that's all coming up

in today's episode of Business Daily it was perhaps a little jarring at first because you're sort of sitting at this screen

waiting with beta breath to see what it comes up with. Meet Lottie Haitam. She's in her 20s,

lives in the UK, in London. She's also being dealing with grief. Lottie lost both her parents

within two months of each other.

Her dad died from cancer and soon after her mum died by suicide.

So as a young journalist, Lottie wanted to write about it and in particular to investigate

this mysterious new genre of ghostbods.

...