Comment by brtkwr
5 days ago
I’ve also found it useful for personal stuff. For example I have my OpenClaw bot in a family group on Telegram and everyday it asks my family members stories from their lives that it meticulously documents and uses as a basis for further questions in the future and has so far managed to build a rich family history spanning 50 odd family members (a project I had always been planning to do for never found the time to).
I can't relate to this need to fully explore and then document everyone's history - I can have a conversation for an evening and forget everything the next day, and I'm happy with that, the truly important things (to me) will distill themselves naturally.
A case of different strokes for different folks I suppose.
In my case, I was curious about my ancestry and Nepal doesn't currently have an equivalent of an ancestry.com therefore the best source of the information is my family themselves while they're still alive.
I am weirded out but this, I find it horrific, like some kind of mind zombie, leeching humanity from your family members.
Someone somewhere is thinking they're connecting with you and sharing their humanity but they're just shoveling their soul into a machine that is "meticulously documenting" them.
Sorry, but ick.
To give a different perspective: archival is important. If nobody does this job, generational knowledge is lost at some point.
I talked plenty with my grandpa, but I'm sure he didn't even tell me 20% of his life.
And my other grandpa died when I was still a kid, so I didn't even get to have adult conversations with him.
Imagine making this available to your grandgrandgrandson.
Yeah, but you're kaoD. You're a bonafide person. You should talk with other people; it's good. (We're chatting right now.)
That's quite different from chatting with a bot that pretends to be human. (Do you want to chat with my bot?)
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Btw my family know they are talking to the bot and they know that the bot is taking notes for our benefit. And I am in the channel and I enjoy reading those stories myself and would have never thought to ask those questions myself. Sometimes I ask the follow up questions myself too...
Well that makes it a lot less bad, it sounded from your post like it messages on your behalf and as you.
If it identifies as a bot then I find it a lot less objectionable.
I still wouldn't do it myself, but I can put the pitchfork down.
hi, cool use-case! Question: do they have to type it, or one can upload an audio (old people such as me may talk for 5mins about a mini-story vs typing for 20mins, especially if they use a phone vs windows telegram application (typing on a keyboard vs the smartphone). in which case, do you got a STT 'module' that will pick up the audio, transcribe it, and then 'process' it?
I actually think this is cool. How is this different than sitting people down with a camera every day and asking for a new random story? we won't be around forever and documenting it is one way to keep memories alive in people's minds
I was surprised myself how engaged my family have been with the bot. And equipped with the knowledge of our family history, it is able to ask deeply informed follow up questions! I would recommend trying it!
Would you feel differently if it was an app that sent notifications every day to people to document their thoughts/memories?
I think the ick factor you are feeling is from anthromorphizing a computer program by thinking its a "mind zombie".
You are making a lot of assumptions.
I hope OP is using some self-hosted local model to document their family archives
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Wow. This is a really cool idea. I am using Obsidian for family history, but I never thought to let people chat with it and update it via OpenClaw.
This is a great idea! I’d be curious to learn more about your setup, particularly how it asks your family and follows up with further questions? Does it do it based on a graph of your family it builds real time? Or is it smart enough that you just prompt it to “follow up with more questions”? I’m having a hard time imagining it asking my family engaging questions they won’t just say, “I don’t remember”.
This is to the people who are highly against this - when you read a book you are doing this - talking to others across time and space. This isn't that much different.
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