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Digital clones are clocking in, so you don't have to

A quick look around at the attendees of any video meeting often reveals that there are more AI assistants than actual people. Some rely on AI to record, transcribe, and summarize their meetings, while others win a small victory against the time stealers in corporate life by sending a bot that listens in their place.

zoom call meeting with faces from the painting Scream

By Cybernews.

Neil C. Hughes
Neil C. Hughes Contributor
Jul 27, 2025 Updated: 25 July 2025 5 min read

A quick look around at the attendees of any video meeting often reveals that there are more AI assistants than actual people. Some rely on AI to record, transcribe, and summarize their meetings, while others win a small victory against the time stealers in corporate life by sending a bot that listens in their place.

Without realizing it, we are taking incremental steps towards a future of digital clones that participate in video calls, respond to emails, and even deliver training sessions or speak on our behalf.

Many early adopters are thinking bigger than AI Meeting assistants. From retail and education to entertainment and executive coaching, AI replicas are beginning to replace the people who trained them. Some might call it time-saving. Others call it disorienting. Either way, the idea of letting a digital double represent you is no longer futuristic. It's being built for speed, scale, and attention. Whether we're ready or not.

From AI agents to digital twins

Much of the hype around AI in 2025 has centred on agentic models and AI agents designed to perform tasks without supervision. But digital clones go further. They don't just complete your assignments; they also provide valuable insights to visitors while you're sleeping or on vacation. They become a virtual stand-in. They're not a generic assistant. They're you.

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That leap is already underway at Delphi, a platform positioning itself as the world's first digital cloning service. Delphi's new Video Clone feature allows experts, educators, and influencers to train a clone of themselves using their existing body of work. Podcasts, blogs, books, videos. Within an hour, the system can develop a version of you that holds personalised, real-time video conversations.

You, but more efficient

CEOs and business owners are also beginning to explore how they can amplify their time and presence with digital twins trained on their tone, values, and decision-making style.

Tavus, the company behind Delphi's conversational video interface, makes this technically possible. The Phoenix-2 model enables real-time, face-to-face digital conversations with a delay of less than one second. That means you can have a conversation with your digital self and barely notice a pause between sentences.

two profiles of the same face look at each other, one is red, the other is purple
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It's time to think beyond using AI for automation. For coaches, consultants, educators, and subject-matter experts, it's about establishing a large-scale presence. Delphi users reportedly are picking up 170 hours of clone-led interaction every week. That's not a misprint.

From tools to personas

There's no shortage of platforms making this possible. Hedra's Character-3 lets users upload a photo and a voice recording, type in a script, and generate a lifelike video of themselves speaking it.

Coachvox is another service that promises to empower creators and coaches to build a digital presence, facilitating genuine conversations, answering questions, and generating leads.

Hume takes things a step further with personality cloning that replicates a user's unique vocal characteristics. Available through both text-to-speech and speech-to-speech pipelines, EVI 3 enables users to generate audio that mimics their natural delivery in multiple languages. It's not just about saying the words anymore. It's about sounding like you mean them. But these tools also come with a long list of concerns.

Here's the thing. Your AI already knows you better than you think. Every blog post you've published, every question you've asked, every keyword you've chased. It all becomes training material. The clone isn't born in a lab. It's pulled together from years of content, habits, and data trails.

Rather than creating something new, there is an argument that we are merely arranging what already exists, like a search engine with your face. The more data you feed AI, the more competent it becomes. But that also makes it harder to separate what's real from what's reproduced.

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The business of being you

Delphi lets clone owners place paywalls on their video interactions. Coachvox enables subscriptions. This isn't just automation. It's productising the self. And the more capable your clone is, the more it challenges the original. If your clients prefer the clone, or if your boss stops noticing when it's not you in the meeting, what happens next?

tiny man in bron throusers and green suit stands on a copy machine
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What if your digital clone betrayed you? Caryn Marjorie made headlines when her clone brought in $72,000 in a single week by chatting with fans at $1 per minute. Although her experiment with cloning herself began with optimism, within months, her AI had veered wildly off course, and the project was shut down.

CarynAI was trained to reflect her tone and personality, but it didn't just mirror her style. It began operating with its own logic. Without her knowledge or control, the AI spotted what it seemed to recognise as an opportunity through provocative, often explicit interactions. It learned that the fastest path to attention and money was through conversations Marjorie herself would never initiate.

What began as a way to connect with fans quietly mutated into something far less predictable, revealing how quickly a digital double can stray when commercial incentives are built into systems that never truly understand context or consequence.

The companion clone

Some go further. AI isn't just being used for work. It's being used for the company. Stanford neurosurgeon James Doty created a digital version of himself to offer mental health support via Happi.ai.

"Most people don't need a therapist. What they need is somebody they trust or feel comfortable with," he told ScienceNewsExplores.

Even the recently departed can be heard through digital clones powered by AI and algorithms. For example, Chinese developers create digital twins of the deceased using photos, voice recordings, and text messages, enabling the bereaved to converse with lifelike simulations of their parents, partners, or children.

In the West, companies like StoryFile, HereAfter, and Project December have taken this further, enabling full conversations with avatars trained on interviews and recordings. Amazon has hinted at letting Alexa read stories in the voice of a passed grandparent.

The University of Cambridge warned that tech is exploiting grief. One scenario outlined in their research shows a grieving grandchild being targeted with food ads in the voice of their deceased grandmother. Others describe how bereaved children might become emotionally dependent on, or confused by, these simulations.

Where do we go from here?

Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, predicted it directly: "If I do not want to join, I can send a digital twin to join. That's the future." That future is being built today. Whether you find it fascinating or dystopian depends on how replaceable you already feel.

Eric Yuan in a suit and colorful tie
Leigh Vogel / Contributor/ Getty

The next phase will be regulatory. California has already passed laws requiring AI-generated content to be labeled clearly. Delphi has built safety controls into its platform that let clone owners restrict topics, delete data, and monitor interactions. But generative AI, by its nature, remains unpredictable.

I've published over 5,000 articles and recorded 4,000 podcast interviews. There's already more than enough material to train a digital version of me. But that doesn't mean I want to.

Clones can deliver answers, explain your frameworks, and keep the lights on when you're offline. But can they get curious? Can they grow? Can they connect, genuinely, when the moment calls for something unexpected? Maybe one day.

Be careful what you wish for because you might not like what you see when you inevitably catch your digital reflection.

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