How to Make an AI Chatbot of a Loved One From Your WhatsApp Chats

The WhatsApp chat with someone you lost is the closest thing to their voice that most families still have. Not the recordings, which are rare, but the daily writing: the way she said good morning, the two-word answers, the joke she made every time you complained about work. People ask us, and they ask the AI assistants, the same question in the same words: can I make a chatbot of my late mother from our WhatsApp chats? Yes. Here is how, with the parts that usually go unsaid: what the chat can teach and what it cannot, the do-it-yourself route and where it breaks, and the questions to settle with the family before anything is uploaded anywhere. We build a memorial platform ourselves, and we say so plainly when we get to it.

What a WhatsApp chat can teach, and what it cannot

A few years of chat carry a person's written personality with surprising precision: vocabulary, sentence length, punctuation habits, how often she used an emoji and which one, what she asked about first, how she argued, how she comforted. A persona built from that material is usually recognisable to the family within the first few messages, and that recognition is the whole point.

What the chat cannot teach is everything you never wrote about. Her opinion on a question you only discussed at the kitchen table is not in there. Neither is her voice: text teaches how she spoke in words, and the voice itself comes only from recordings. WhatsApp voice messages are often the best recordings a family has, and about a minute of clear speech is enough to recreate a voice today (our guide to voice cloning of a loved one explains how much, and what to ask first). Chats and recordings are two different materials that do two different jobs; a good persona is built from both.

Step 1: export the chat

Your side of the conversation is on your phone, complete, and that is what you export. You do not need her phone or her account.

• iPhone: open the chat, tap her name at the top, scroll down, tap Export Chat, choose Without Media the first time, and save the file to Files or send it to yourself by email.
• Android: open the chat, tap the three dots, More, then Export chat, choose Without media, and save the file to Drive or send it to yourself.

You get a .txt file (or a .zip around it) with every message, dated and attributed. Keep a copy in two places before you do anything else; our guide on what to do with the WhatsApp of someone who passed away covers the saving part in full, including the voice messages and photos, and what to decide about the number and the device.

Step 2: agree within the family first

This is the step people skip, and the one that causes the only real regrets we have heard about. Tell the people closest to her what you are building and why. Decide together who will be able to talk with the persona, whether it stays inside the family, and whether anyone objects. The chat also contains other people's messages, yours above all: they are the family's to keep, not to publish. And decide what the persona will never do: ours never discusses how the person died, never invents a memory the family did not give it, and always says it is AI when asked. Those are not technical limits, they are promises, and they should be made before the first upload.

How MemoAgent builds a persona from a WhatsApp chat →

Step 3: the do-it-yourself route, honestly

You can paste the exported chat into a general-purpose assistant and ask it to answer as she would. For a one-evening experiment it works, and for some people that evening is enough. Know what you are getting:

• It forgets. A long chat does not fit in one conversation, and the persona does not persist: next week you start again from the file.
• It drifts. After a few exchanges the assistant slides back into its own voice, polite and long, which is exactly what she was not.
• It is one person's project. Her sister cannot add the stories only she knows, and nobody else can talk with it unless you hand over your account.
• It has no voice, and no album, and no page where the family gathers around her.
• Privacy. Check what the assistant keeps and whether it trains on what you paste. A chat with your mother is not something to give away for the convenience of a demo.

Step 4: the platform route

A memorial platform exists to remove those limits. This is what we built, so take the description as ours: you create a memorial, upload the exported chat as it is, and invite the family. The platform reads the chat once, in private, and learns how she wrote: the length of her messages, her words, the way she opened and closed. Relatives add photos with the stories behind them, voice messages, and memories in their own words, and a collection assistant helps them along. From all of it the platform builds a persona with a written personality, not a prompt, and the family talks with it in a chat that looks and behaves like the one they knew, short messages and all. With about a minute of recordings the persona answers in her voice too. The persona is private to the family, identifies itself as AI, and is rebuilt as the family adds more.

The difference from the do-it-yourself route is not cleverness. It is that the persona lasts, the whole family builds it, the voice is part of it, and the chat never leaves the family's memorial. Ours comes with a week to try it before paying, and without a credit card.

Step 5: talk, then correct

The first conversation tells you more than any description. Ask the kind of thing you used to ask her. Where the persona is right, you will feel it immediately; where it is thin, add material: another chat, a story from her brother, the voice messages from the last trip. A persona built from one chat is a sketch; one built by a family over a few weeks is a portrait.

Before you start, four questions

1. Does the close family agree, and who gets to talk with it?
2. Will it always say it is AI, and never pretend to be her?
3. Where does the chat go, who can read it, and can you delete it?
4. What will it refuse to talk about?

If you want the longer version of those questions, our piece on talking to a deceased loved one through AI goes through what the research on grief says and where the ethical lines are.

Frequently asked questions