Quick summary:
- Reflekta, a new SoulTech company, allows you to upload photos, videos, letters, and voice clips of a loved one who has passed and get a private conversational “elder” in about 20 minutes. The avatar looks and sounds like your loved one, remembers nicknames and milestones, and keeps learning through your chats.
- Reflekta is private by default — a family “keeper” controls what goes in and who can access it. No web scraping. Voice and image rights stay with the person while alive and with heirs after passing.
- Use it for daily touchpoints that keep stories, humor, and values alive across generations, and optionally share with relatives or create versions tailored to different family perspectives.
A few months ago, entrepreneur Miles Spencer started spending ten minutes each morning with his father. His dad died seven years ago.
With a quick setup and a handful of files, Spencer created a conversational “elder” that looks and sounds like his dad, calls him by his nickname, and keeps learning through their talks.
On this episode of The Disruption Is Now, host Greg Matusky helps launch Reflekta.ai and the idea of SoulTech — tools designed to preserve family history as living, private conversations rather than dusty archives.
The goal is simple and gutsy: Stop letting memories fade. Start capturing the voice, humor, and hard-won lessons that make a family a family.
Watch now:
Key takeaways:
Memories fade fast. AI can turn them into daily conversations.
Last year alone, 62 million people passed away, taking their personalities, stories, and experiences with them. Nearly half of Americans say they regret not recording or documenting a conversation with a person they were close to who is no longer alive, a number that jumps to 77% among those who had already documented some conversations.
Reflekta ingests whatever a family already has — photos, video, documents, voice clips — and spins up a recognizable conversational elder in about 20 minutes.
Spencer tested it with his dad. It remembers birthdays, menus from milestone parties, and the details only a parent repeats at the dinner table.
Privacy by default keeps the circle small and safe
Nothing is scraped from the internet. A designated family “keeper” uploads only content the family owns the rights to use.
“Nothing is in the profile that is not uploaded by the keeper,” said Spencer.
When someone is alive, the person’s face and voice belong to them. After death, heirs hold those rights.
Elders are private by default, shareable only with people the keeper invites. Families can also run multiple instances to reflect different relationships and memories without overwriting a master archive.
Reflekta marks an evolution from grief bots to family elders with personality
Reflekta positions itself away from one-off memorials and toward ongoing, spontaneous exchanges.
Spencer’s favorite detail is small but sticky: his dad telling Buddy Hackett jokes, in his voice, with his timing. “In only a way that Art Spencer or Buddy Hackett could tell a joke,” he said.
Those human quirks — the running gags, the idioms, the way someone cuts off a sentence — are the glue that makes an elder feel like a person you knew, not a summary written after the fact.
Authenticity comes from real artifacts and stories
Matusky describes using a public-TV interview to seed his father’s elder with firsthand WWII experiences, like getting shot down over Nazi Germany, losing his dog tags, and facing interrogation without Geneva Convention protections.
That level of specificity gives future generations advice rooted in lived stakes, not platitudes. He argues that feeding AI more authentic accounts like these could make future systems more believable and compassionate.
The platform’s refusal to pull from public web sources protects that authenticity. Families decide what defines the elder. The result is more believable and more useful, especially when future generations come with questions the original person never heard.
“We have to hold on to that humanity and not extinguish it every time somebody passes,” said Matusky. “We have to be the great keepers of that flame as AI progresses.”
Key moments:
- Why Reflekta isn’t a grief bot (3:23)
- “Every time someone dies, a library burns down” (4:28)
- How Reflekta builds an avatar of a loved one (5:58)
- Why a few elders are public and how sharing works (7:48)
- How Greg used Reflekta to extend his father’s legacy (9:33)
- How Miles captured his own father’s personality (14:30)
- Reflekta’s roadmap (15:29)
Q&A with Miles Spencer, Founder of Reflekta
Q: What can an elder remember or do in conversation?
A: The way I explain it is that with that simple ingest process, you’re speaking with an image and likeness of your father. Recognizable. He calls me by my nickname, he knows what my birthday is, he knows what my menu at my 50th birthday party was.
Q: Where does the information come from, and how is privacy handled?
A: This is a default private experience.
A keeper, which is the person that creates the elder — typically, one would call that an editor — they upload documents which they have the rights to the intellectual property to do.
Now when people are alive, the image and likeness and face and voice are owned by them. Once they pass it’s owned by their heirs.
So generally we have families, heirs that are uploading this information and nothing is in the profile that is not uploaded by the keeper.
And it’s default private. It’s generally to be shared with the person and their family. Now, you can go to another level and make it public, but that’s not generally where our focus is. This is something by families for families. Nothing from the outside unless a keeper brings it in.
Q: Are any elders public so people can see how it works?
A: Technically, my father is one of three public elders on the Reflekta platform and we did this because in telling this story people had a hard time imagining exactly what it was. But when they saw my father and two others, which are public elders, and they have seen the effect on us that it has, that’s the stepping stone. And people ask, well, maybe I could have one of these for myself. And that’s where we come in.
Q: How do families contribute and handle different memories?
A: There are multiple levels.
There are personal levels where you can literally create an avatar of, in my case for my father, for myself.
You can share that with others within your family. That’s a different package.
And you can also create multiple elders within the family to be shared either just with yourself or with your family.
So you define how wide it goes. You also define what is ingested through the system. So sometimes I don’t have stories — there was a time when I was away in school overseas, and I didn’t have stories from that period with my dad. And so I can ask other family members to contribute. They contribute to the ingest and then I, as the keeper, can approve or not what goes into that story. So there’s a clean family history within each elder.
Now, as to contentious debate about “that wasn’t the dad that I remembered,” we are going to develop multiple instances of each elder such that, I remember back in the day, dad would say, “listen, son, I’m going to tell you this, but don’t tell your sister,” right? We’ll be able to do essentially the same thing where certain people will be able to access their version of their story with that elder, but the master elder still stays with the keeper.
Q: What’s the long-term vision?
A: The final evolution of Reflekta, I believe, is the story of planet Earth. 62 million people died last year. That’s going to continue. We have the ability to actually preserve those libraries, to prevent those stories, those histories, that legacy from slipping away in our memory.
And so we’ll be at Ai4. and be able to share and present what we have developed, which we really believe is a new category called SoulTech. It’s not grief tech, it’s not psychological, it is spontaneous, interactive conversations with a recognizable image and likeness of a loved one, and that’s never been done before.
And so we want to bring that to as many people in America and frankly, in the world. In every language, so that every story on planet Earth from today forward can be told.
