Ask Dalí is an innovative and unique museum audio experience that leverages emerging AI technologies to bring back to life one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century: Salvador Dalí. It’s a fully audio-driven platform that enables museumgoers to have a real conversation with the surrealist genius through a re-creation of his iconic Lobster Phone, despite his having passed away in 1989.

Salvador Dalí was a Spanish artist whose name became synonymous with the surrealist movement and who was known for iconic works like The Persistence of Memory and Lobster Phone.

Over the years, Dalí constructed a persona as surreal as the dreamscapes he depicted on canvas, often communicating in metaphors and parables.

Notably, Dalí did not believe in his own death. He even indulged in a sort of scientific mysticism, as a means of cheating death and achieving immortality. Thus, resurrecting him through AI means more than creating an interactive museum experience—it’s a contribution to his quest for immortality.

As museum patrons approach the Ask Dalí installation, they are invited to pick up a re-creation of Dalí’s iconic Lobster Phone and engage in a conversation with the surrealist genius. Dalí will answer their questions in real time as if he had been brought back to life.

Through a combination of cutting-edge AI platforms—including GPT-4 Turbo from OpenAI and Eleven Multilingual V2 from ElevenLabs—trained on Dalí’s works, texts and interviews, we were able to re-create not only Dalí's voice but also his speech style and knowledge.

Thus, when museumgoers pick up the re-created Lobster Phone, they can have an interactive experience that’s almost indistinguishable from talking to Dalí himself.

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The Dalí Museum has a long-standing tradition of merging art with technology—from VR to deepfakes. With the constant evolution of AI capabilities, we saw the opportunity to utilize AI to create an experience that is not only innovative but that also provides a unique way to interact with the brilliant mind of Salvador Dalí.

So in order to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Salvador Dalí’s birth, we were tasked with creating a unique and groundbreaking experience for the Dalí Museum. Our goal was to connect one of the greatest artists of the last century with an audience increasingly focused on the present and its emerging technologies.

Ask Dalí made its debut at SXSW, becoming one of the event’s most anticipated panels, called “AI and the Future of Creativity.” It was an instant success, drawing long queues of audience members who were eager to talk with the surrealist genius.

Although the experience launched on April 11, it made a huge impact, with over 500 million PR impressions in only one week. Ask Dalí continues to garner global attention, having made headlines across the Americas, Europe and Asia, and has been featured in major news outlets, such as Fox News, Forbes, Inc. magazine, NPR, and Smithsonian Magazine. Our digital re-creation of Salvador Dalí has been the topic of numerous interviews, including even a podcast.

In the week following the launch, the museum saw a significant surge in ticket sales, with Ask Dalí attracting long lines of patrons who were eager to interact with the digital Salvador Dalí.

Ask Dalí is a meeting of technologies old and new: the rotary telephone, one of the primary means of communication during Salvador Dalí’s life, and several cutting-edge foundational machine-learning models, including GPT-4 Turbo from OpenAI and Multilingual V2 from ElevenLabs. If you had picked up a telephone in 1964 and called Salvador Dalí, his voice would have been heard from the earpiece of the telephone handset. If you pick up the re-created Lobster Telephone in 2024, the same thing will happen, only now his voice comes to you thanks to artificial intelligence.

This innovation hasn’t been possible until very recently, because the underlying technologies weren’t fast or good enough to support a real-time conversation between a person and the AI. But with ElevenLabs’ Multilingual V2 in combination with OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo we have a solution that can deliver the right quality fast enough for an actual conversation.