London-based artificial intelligence startup Synthesia has recently released an impressive innovation called "Expressive Avatars" with the support of NVIDIA. These AI-driven digital virtual humans can display various human emotions such as happiness, sadness, and frustration based on the text input provided by users.
Synthesia's EXPRESS-1 model provides powerful dynamics for these virtual humans, allowing them to predict each action and facial expression in real-time, perfectly blending with the rhythm, intonation, and emphasis in language. The performance is natural and realistic, setting a new benchmark in the industry.
Synthesia revealed that its technology has been adopted by over 55,000 companies, including half of the Fortune 500 companies, mainly for creating digital virtual humans for corporate presentations and training videos. Last year, the company raised a staggering $90 million in funding from investors, with a valuation close to $1 billion, making it a rising AI "unicorn" in the UK.
Expressive Avatars have a wide range of potential applications, from enhancing employee onboarding experiences to interactive customer service. In a blog post announcing this new feature, the company described a vivid application scenario:
Imagine the traditional experience of a new employee onboarding: often a static video, although an improvement over lengthy documents, it still appears monotonous.
Soon, you will be able to recreate the entire workplace experience on our platform. AI virtual humans will be able to freely move in a three-dimensional space, interact with you or other virtual humans, take you on a tour of the workspace, help you find meeting rooms, teach you about the company and its products, and even introduce you to colleagues before you meet them in person.
Tanuja Randery, Managing Director for Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Amazon Web Services (AWS), is one of the first companies to experience this technology. She said, "I had the privilege of personally experiencing the process of creating my own virtual human for a keynote speech at the AWS London Summit, witnessing the potential of this technology to provide engaging business communication in different languages and scenarios, which was previously unimaginable."
Synthesia has taken proper measures to address concerns about potential misuse of the technology, requiring publishers to register as enterprise customers and undergo a strict "know your customer" process. The company is also responsible for content moderation and has implemented control measures to prevent election manipulation for upcoming global elections.
Furthermore, they are members of the "Content Attribution and Authenticity Alliance" and have committed to ensuring that the audience is aware that the content is AI-generated through digital watermarks and content credentials.
