Talk about digital humans today and you’ll likely evoke images of a Blade Runner-style cityscape that’s teeming with a milieu of robotic “replicants” that live and work alongside real humans.
It’s a futuristic vision that most believe won’t become reality for many years to come, but they might be surprised to discover just how far the concept of digital humans has evolved. Although digital humans don’t yet live in the real world, they’re becoming increasingly prevalent in our digital realities, with advanced AI algorithms helping them to look, act and converse in almost human-like ways.
What is a digital human?
Because their interactions are powered by AI, we can say that digital humans are the next evolution of chatbots like ChatGPT. But rather than a simple chatbox, they appear as if they were real humans. They’re virtual characters that can interact with humans in more realistic ways. They’re emotionally intelligent and expressive entities that appear as human-like avatars, only they bear a much closer resemblance to actual people than the cartoonish avatars we know from the metaverse, both in their appearance and their behavior.
What’s special about digital humans is that real people can relate to them – they’re much more like “someone”, as opposed to “something”, which makes them vastly more engaging than any chatbot. They can fulfill almost any role, from teacher or brand ambassador to retail concierge or financial advisor, and connect with real people in a much more profound way.
Digital humans are like non-playable characters, except they don’t live in video games, but throughout the digital world. They can be found online on YouTube, or when you visit a website, and interact with humans in all kinds of ways and scenarios. Moreover, they react intelligently based on your input, with an ability to gauge your mood based on the tone of your voice, facial expressions and body language, which gives them a much more nuanced understanding.
According to Deloitte, digital humans are defined by their ability to replicate the entire range of human body language, providing an “appropriate non-verbal response” when asked or queried by a human. In other words, they go further than just interpreting what someone has said. This is key to making digital humans appear so realistic. As per UneeQ, nonverbal factors like body language and tone of voice account for 93% of human communication. Because digital humans can see and read your body language and your face, they can read between the lines, so to speak, detecting irony, sarcasm, displeasure, humor and other feelings, allowing them to respond in a more realistic way.
Digital humans are likely to become much more prominent in the digital world because they offer some compelling advantages over real humans. For one thing, they don’t need to sleep, so they’re always ready to interact, and they don’t demand a wage for their time, either. They can be scaled to meet almost any kind of use case, so a big name brand like Coca-Cola could effectively deploy millions of digital humans to act as a brand ambassador or customer service representative without breaking a sweat.
In some cases, people might be hesitant to discuss sensitive issues with a real person. For instance, The Verge notes that women might find it much easier to talk to a digital human about their bra size, especially if there are only male human sales assistants available in the store.
From Cartoonish to Photorealistic
Thanks to the efforts of Meta Platforms and the lame metaverse-based rendition of its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, many people believe that digital humans don’t look anything like their real-life counterparts. As such, most think they’ll be able to realize immediately that they’re interacting with an avatar, rather than another person. Humans, after all, have an ingrained ability to smell a rate, so to speak.
But the reality is different. Startups like Antix have significantly raised the bar for digital humans. By creating them with advanced graphics engines it has built a number of highly photorealistic digital humans that blur the lines between avatar and reality.
The company’s Avagen platform relies on the powerful Unreal Engine 5 software, enabling it to bring digital humans to live with a stunning level of detail. Everything from the digital humans facial expressions, body language, the tone of their skin, the accessories they wear, the clothing fabric and the environment they exist in is extremely lifelike, impressing even the most critical naysayers of AI.
By combining these photorealistic avatars with advanced large language models, Antix is able to build truly lifelike digital humans that look, sound and act like genuine people. They’re able to display emotions, both in their looks and their manner of talking, act with empathy, and respond to all manner of questions like a physical person would do.
In this way, Antix’s digital humans can be useful in complex scenarios, using their understanding of the context to interact in ways that would have been impossible only a couple of years ago. They promise to transform people’s online experiences. So if a fan of Beyonce, Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande calls and they’re in tears because they’ve lost their concert ticket, these intelligent digital humans will instantly recognize their upset and respond in a calming, reassuring way. This, combined with their photorealistic appearance, can make them much more capable than even the most powerful chatbot.
Coming Alive
Digital humans are no longer confined to the imagination. They’re here and now, popping up everywhere from retail outlets to brands’ websites to influencer’s YouTube channels. They’re the next level up from the eponymous chatbot, able to pick up on nonverbal cues to respond in intelligent and humanistic ways, with their realistic looks and charming manner helping to put anyone at ease.
Because they’re getting easier to create and simpler to deploy, digital humans are likely to become much more commonplace in the future. It may be that you find yourself learning with a digital teacher, or talking to a digital service provider, and you may even be tempted to build your own digital human, based on your own likeness, to handle online interactions on your behalf.
The technology is still nascent, but digital humans are real, they’re among us now, and they’re only going to get better, more commonplace and more realistic as time goes by.
| Disclaimer: The text above is an advertorial article that is not part of Coincu.com editorial content. |
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