This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own.
"The doting husband has gained thousands of followers on Instagram by sharing insights into his life with Miku, but things took an unexpected turn during the pandemic when Gatebox announced it was discontinuing its service for Miku."
this is why I have trust issues with proprietary software
hmm not sure if that would work as the model that he was using would be different from what's available so he'd probably notice some differences which might cause a mix of uncanny valley and surrealism/suspension of disbelief where the two are noticably not the same
plus using a chat-only model would be real tragic as it's a significant downgrade from what they already had
his story actually feels like a Romeo and Juliet situation
LLM is capable of role-playing, character.ai for example can get into the role of any character after being trained. The sound is just text-to-speech, character.ai already includes that, though if a realistic voice is desired, it would need to be generated by a more sophisticated method, which is already being done. Example: Neuro-sama, ElevenLabs
Doesn't even take a change of service provider to get there.
Replika had what had very obviously become a virtual mate service too, until they decided "love" wasn't part of their system anymore. Probably because it looked bad for investors, as happened for a lot of AI-based services people used for smut.
So a bunch of lonely people had their "virtual companion" suddenly lobotomized, and there's nothing they could do about it.
At first the idea was it'd be training an actual "replica" of yourself, that could reflect your own personality. Then when they realized their was a demand for companionship they converted it into virtual friend. Then of course there was a demand for "more than friends", and yeah, they made it possible to create a custom mate for a while.
Then suddenly it became a problem for them to be seen as a light porn generator. Probably because investors don't want to touch that, or maybe because of a terms of servce change with their AI service provider.
At that point they started to censor lewd interactions and pretend replika was never supposed to be more than a friendly bot you can talk to. Which is, depending on how you interpret what services they proposed and how they advertized them until then, kind of a blatant lie.
Next thing you know, he doesn't read the fine print, ther "brain" is internet connected and, sooner or later, he won't have a Miku talking back to him again