Virtual Human News Anchors Shown on Chinese TV Network!

Source:CDO Trends

Every Monday, the anchor — known as Xiao C — presents sporting events such as football, basketball, volleyball, and swimming on the network, which the China Media Group owns.

Dressed in a pink t-shirt with her hair tied in buns, Xiao C interacts with human sports commentators, talks about game tactics, and poses questions to the audience.

Chinese technology company Baidu has developed her as an early example of a virtual human market that has been forecast to be worth USD38.5 billion by 2030, according to industry services platform QbitAI.

That revenue will come, says QbitAI, from virtual celebrities and service-oriented virtual humans.

Baidu has also launched two “companionship-oriented” virtual beings, Lin Kaikai and Ye Youyou. They are powered by Baidu’s Plato platform, which is trained in over 10 billion parameters collected from social media conversations in both English and Chinese.

The two can converse over text, voice messages, and emojis, offer customized wake-up calls and learn about users' preferences through the frequency of interactions.

Baidu also has released a digital avatar called Xiling, which enables the creation of virtual hosts, celebrities, and brand spokespeople.

“With breakthroughs made in artificial intelligence-powered algorithms, the production cost of digital humans will be reduced by 10 to 100 times, and the production period will be shortened from several months to a few hours,” a Baidu spokesperson told the China Daily in September.

China’s Government launched an action plan in August 2022 to drive the digital human sector and to develop one or two leading virtual human companies by 2025.

The plan calls for efforts to develop virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality terminal equipment, apply speech recognition, natural language understanding, and other AI technologies to improve the interactive qualities of virtual beings.