With the super-difficult third jump, talented girl Gu Ailing successfully won the gold medal of freestyle skiing women's platform event in Beijing Winter Olympics. At the end of the day, Gu Ailing harvested 50 hot topics and pushed the already hot Winter Olympics to a climax again.
As a global partner of the International Olympic Committee, Alibaba did not compete for Gu Ailing's popularity, and launched a brand-new digital person "Dongdong" to help promote the 2022 Winter Olympics.
They are also virtual people, and the content of virtual people in this Winter Olympics can be said to be in oversupply.
Previously, Meet GU, the "digital avatar" of Gu Ailing launched by China Mobile's Migu Video, has been stationed in the studio of Migu Winter Olympics, and completed the work of skiing events explanation, broadcast and virtual interaction of scene e-commerce.
There are also a number of virtual digital people, such as Feng Xiaoshu, a virtual host jointly created by China Meteorological Bureau and Xiao Bing Company, an AI sign language anchor jointly created by CCTV News and Baidu AI Cloud, and a 3D virtual Wang Bingbing presented by Iflytek.
The digital man "Dongdong" launched by Ali this time was developed by Dharma Institute, a global research institution of Ali. The role is set as a 22-year-old Beijing girl with a warm and straightforward personality and a passion for ice and snow sports.
At present, Dongdong's main function is "anchor with goods", which helps Tmall Olympic flagship store in China to promote Olympic licensed goods during live broadcast. In addition, she can answer questions with her voice, make various actions, introduce interesting Olympic events to the audience, and perform dances with the Olympic theme song to cheer for the Olympic athletes.
Different from the virtual images created by 3D modeling and CG technology in the past, Alibaba built a cloud-based artificial intelligence model for winter and winter, synthesized human voices by text-to-speech technology, and created various facial expressions and body movements by 3D driving technology.
The combination of these technologies enables Dongdong to naturally participate in conversations similar to real people, and its conversations are completely generated in real time by artificial intelligence technology in the cloud.
Compared with AYAYI, Ali's first digital employee, Digital Man Dongdong, achieved many technical breakthroughs. From the perspective of appearance and interaction, winter and winter are more agile and lively, and Mandarin with Beijing accent is more intimate.
It can be said that Ali is full of confidence in fighting against virtual idols again this time.
In order to bring greater economic value to the virtual human economy, it is necessary to break through two major difficulties: graphic technology and artificial intelligence, among which natural language processing to solve the problem of human-computer interaction is the bottom technology that needs to be broken most.
It is the future development direction to effectively connect the service scene and performance scene of digital people and give full play to the labor efficiency of virtual people.
Alibaba is constantly laying out in the field of virtual people. It is found in China National Intellectual Property Administration patent search and analysis website that Alibaba frequently appears in the top five related technology patents.
Bruce Lee, head of Ali's intelligent customer service and intelligent digital people business, said that in the future, Ali will further broaden the technical boundaries and "create fascinating mixed reality."
Although the virtual human is still in the initial stage of development, it will surely usher in a new outbreak in 2022 after the test of the Winter Olympics. We must put technology first and give virtual people time!
In the future, virtual people will enter a new era with specific personality and personalized behavior, and further enhance the realism of the virtual world. At that stage, virtual people may be called the leader of the universe.