Calls from the Afterlife

Automated phone calls to loved ones from beyond the grave

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死んだあとも冥土から電話がかけられる「冥土の電話」を開発しました。今年は初めて一人ではなく、@takitomiと一緒に参加しました。楽しかった！ #24contest

I built this in Cookpad's 24-hour hackathon. The brief was "a service your older self would use".

A communication service designed to let you stay connected with loved ones even after you pass away. It automatically delivers pre-recorded voice calls to family and friends, triggered by future milestones or real-time social events.

Mechanism & Triggers

When scheduling a message via the web interface, the system places a call to your phone allowing you to record your audio directly over the receiver. The recorded voice is then queued and dispatched via Twilio whenever specific conditions are met:

Built during a 24-hour hackathon themed around "services for your older self," this prototype explores how telephony APIs can reshape memorialization and ongoing connection beyond a person's lifetime.

Updates

Cookpad's 4th 24-hour contest: "Calls from the Afterlife"

■ Overview

I took part in Cookpad's 24-hour hackathon, held from 09:00 on Saturday 15 June to 09:00 on Sunday 16 June. The brief was "a service your older self would use".

Here I will introduce "Calls from the Afterlife", the service built by me and a younger colleague. (I will write up the process and my impressions separately.)

■ What is Calls from the Afterlife?

Calls from the Afterlife is a service that lets you carry on being part of the lives of the people who matter to you after you have died. Your child's wedding, your grandchild's first football match, a friend having a hard time — all the moments you would have wanted to say something. With Calls from the Afterlife, at those moments, your people get a phone call from you, in the afterlife.

■ How to use it

(1) While still alive, register at Calls from the Afterlife (http://49.212.221.31:3000/). (Note that because of the APIs this service depends on, it will stop working of its own accord fairly soon — as of 16 June. Apologies in advance.)

(2) Register the people who matter. Add the phone numbers of the family and friends you would want to call after you have gone.

(3) Record a message Register a message for one of them. When you do, you specify who to call and under what condition. As soon as you create the message on the page, the system rings your number. After the beep, speak your message. That message is then delivered by phone to the person you chose, once the condition you set is met.

■ Setting the condition

Two kinds of trigger are implemented at the moment: by date, and by Twitter.

○ By date

The call is placed on a particular day (say 2013-06-15), or on any day matching a pattern (****-06-15 being every 15 June). For instance:

  • wish your wife a happy birthday every year, after you have gone
  • call to congratulate your child on their coming-of-age day
  • remind a forgetful wife, on the first of every month, to pay the rent

○ By Twitter

The call is placed when a given account tweets a given keyword. For instance:

  • when your child is worn out (their account says "exhausted"), call to cheer them up
  • when your grandchild wins a Nobel Prize (their account says "won the Nobel Prize"), call to congratulate them
  • when the market crashes (a newspaper account says "shares plunge"), call your wife with instructions about savings
  • in a hotter summer than usual (a weather account says "heatwave, above average"), call your wife for a chat about how hot it is

and so on — there is a lot you can do with it.

○ (not implemented) By Facebook

The call is placed when a given Facebook account does something particular. For instance:

  • call to congratulate your child when their relationship status goes from "single" to "married"

■ How it was built

The stack:

  • Rails + Bootstrap (front end)
  • Java (back end — the Twitter analysis and the Twilio integration)
  • The Twilio API (placing phone calls from a program; it costs money, so Calls from the Afterlife ends when the initial credit runs out)

Do have a play, for as long as the service is still up.