Beijing 2022: Alibaba launches a virtual avatar to interact with fans during the Olympics

Alibaba has activated its partnership with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) through the creation of a virtual avatar, named Dong Dong ("winter"), who will interact with the public during the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games, according to the Chinese e-commerce group on 10/02/2022.

"Dong Dong is known for her authentic human-like features, sparkling personality, as well as her specialty to interact with audiences in an engaging manner. She can perform live talk shows to introduce Olympic fun facts to the audience, and show-off her enthusiastic, upbeat dance moves to accompany the Olympic theme songs to cheer for the Olympians. To realize Dong Dong's dynamic personality, Alibaba built a special cloud-based AI model, which uses text to speech to synthesize human voices and leverages 3D-driven technology to create various realistic facial expressions and natural body movements. Alibaba's multimodal algorithms, have been used to make Dong Dong 'smart' enough to take part in human-like dialogues naturally, with her scripts entirely generated by cloud technologies," said…