New Digital Studio Lets Brands Build Their Own Realistic Human Avatars Powered by AI

The startup says the digital people can be used for anything from customer support to HR training

Businesses may soon be able to designate duties like customer support or training exercises to life-like virtual personas through a new tool from artificial intelligence startup Soul Machines.

The San Francisco-based company debuted a digital brand studio this week that lets clients customize their own digital person by choosing from a set of realistic CGI avatars and uploading conversational trees with natural language processing systems from Google or IBM.

Founded by Academy Award-winning visual effects engineer Mark Sagar and entrepreneur Greg Cross at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Soul Machines is part of a small but growing scene of startups exploring how life-like human avatars can be put to use in business contexts, whether as virtual influencers, extensions of celebrity personalities or for interpersonal interaction practice.

“The objective here is not to replace people, it’s to really focus on things that are very, very difficult for organizations to deliver, like infinitely...

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