Earlier today, Alibaba’s global research initiative, DAMO Academy, announced the debut of an official Beijing Winter Olympics “virtual influencer” capable of answering event questions in real-time while employing lifelike facial expressions and gestures as well as promote official Olympic merchandise, of course. Her name is Dong Dong, and stop laughing. Often things get lost in the global linguistic shuffle.
For the project, Alibaba built a tailored cloud-based AI model employing text-to-speech tech, “multimodal algorithms” alongside “Natural Language Processing (NLP), Emotional Speech Synthesis and computer vision on the cloud.” While it looks like Dong Dong is restricted to Olympic attendees in China, you can still watch a quick video showcasing some of their accomplishments below.
