Alan Hamel, the widower of Suzanne Somers, has taken the idea of being a wife guy to a new level. Two years after her death, he’s turned to AI in an extreme effort to keep her memory alive.
In an interview with PEOPLE, Hamel (best known as a TV host in Canada) opened up about working with the company Realbotix to recreate Somers’ likeness. “Obviously, Suzanne was greatly loved, not only by her family, but by millions of people,” he said. “One of the projects that we have coming up is a really interesting project, the Suzanne AI Twin.”
Hamel described the robotic doll, modeled after Sommers’ Three’s Company character Chrissy Snow, as “perfect.” “I asked her a few questions and she answered them, and it blew me and everybody else away,” he recalled of a demo presented at a conference in March. “When you look at the finished one next to the real Suzanne, you can’t tell the difference. It’s amazing. And I mean, I’ve been with Suzanne for 55 years, so I know what her face looks like, and when I just look at the two of them side by side, I really can’t tell which one is the real and which one is the AI.”
The project involved training an LLM on all 27 of Somers’ books and “hundreds” of interviews from her career. According to Hamel, this allows the AI to answer “any question at all.”
Apparently, the project was part of Somers’ wishes before she died in October 2023 after a decades-long battle with breast cancer. Hamel told PEOPLE that “it was Suzanne’s idea” after computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil introduced them to the concept in the ’80s.
“She said, ‘I think we should do that,'” Hamel remembered, adding that Somers believed the AI could “provide a service to my fans and to people who have been reading my books who really want and need information about their health.”
Fast forward to the present, where their family has grown to “really love the idea,” calling it a “great tribute” to his late wife. “They said, ‘We’re going to get to the point where it’s not going to seem weird, and it’ll just be another way to communicate with people we cared about,’” Hamel explained.
For all the thought behind the project, the early demo of the robot feels more like a 1950s Disney animatronic than a living memorial, with all the life and warmth of a prerecorded DMV message. Yet, Hamel is confident that the clone will evolve to the point where “we’ll put her on SuzanneSomers.com and we’ll invite all her fans and all our customers to come and talk to her. They can come and just hang out with her. They can ask her any questions they want. She’ll be available 24/7, and I think it’ll be really wonderful.”
“There’ll be people who will ask her about their health issues, and Suzanne will be able to answer them,” he explained, adding that health-related responses are fact-checked. “Everything that Suzanne wrote in her books, because most of them were interviews with doctors, was cleared by Life Extension, which is a large health company that employs a lot of doctors and scientists. So every word of the interview and the claims that were being made were checked by them.”
For now, check out an early demo of the AI version of “Suzanne” below.
