Virtual singer Luo Tianyi performing with world renowned pianist Lang Lang in 2019 on the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai, China. Launched in 2012, Luo Tianyi has nearly 3 million fans and even performed on the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing this yr.
Visual China Group | Getty Images
BEIJING — From customer support to the entertainment industry, businesses in China are paying big bucks for virtual employees.
Tech company Baidu said the variety of virtual people projects it’s worked on for clients has doubled since last yr, with a large price range of as little as $2,800 to a whopping $14,300 per yr.
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Virtual individuals are a mixture of animation, sound tech and machine learning that create digitized human beings who can sing and even interact on a livestream. While these digital beings have appeared on the fringes of the U.S. web, they have been popping up increasingly more in China’s cyberspace.
Some buyers of virtual people include financial services firms, local tourism boards and state media, said Li Shiyan, who heads Baidu’s virtual people and robotics business.
Because the tech improves, costs have dropped by about 80% since last yr, he said. It costs about 100,000 yuan ($14,300) a yr for a three-dimensional virtual person, and 20,000 yuan for a two-dimensional one.
Li expects the virtual person industry overall will continue to grow by 50% annually through 2025.
Looking for scandal-free icons
From a business perspective, much of the main focus is on how virtual people can generate content.
Brands in China are in search of alternative spokespeople after many celebrities recently bumped into negative press about tax evasion or personal scandals, said Sirius Wang, chief product officer and head of marketplace Greater China at Kantar.
Dancers perform with virtual digital people on the Future Life Festival 2022 in Hangzhou, China, on Nov. 4, 2022.
Future Publishing | Future Publishing | Getty Images
At the very least 36% of consumers had watched a virtual influencer or digital celebrity perform within the last yr, based on a survey published by Kantar this fall. Twenty-one percent had watched a virtual person host an event or broadcast the news, the report said.
Waiting for next yr, 45% of advertisers said they could sponsor a virtual influencer’s performance or invite a virtual person to affix a brand’s event, based on the Kantar report.
Growing development of virtual people
Lots of China’s large tech firms have already been developing products within the virtual humans industry.
Video and game streaming app Bilibili was considered one of the earliest to take the concept of virtual people mainstream.
The corporate acquired the team behind virtual singer Luo Tianyi, whose image and sound are fully created by tech. This yr, the developers focused on improving the feel of the virtual singer’s voice by utilizing a synthetic intelligence algorithm, based on Bilibili.
Launched in 2012, Luo Tianyi has nearly 3 million fans and even performed on the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing this yr.
Bilibili also hosts many so-called virtual anchors, that are the direct avatars of individuals using special technology to succeed in their audience. The corporate said 230,000 virtual anchors began broadcasting on its platform since 2019, and the virtual anchors’ broadcasting time this yr surged by about 200% from last yr.
Tencent said in its latest earnings call that Tencent Cloud AI Digital Humans provide chatbots to sectors comparable to financial services and tourism for automated customer support. The corporate’s Next Studios also developed a virtual singer and virtual sign language interpreter.
Far smaller firms are also moving into the industry.
Startup Well-Link Technologies — whose cloud rendering tech support for Chinese video game developer miHoYo brought it success within the gaming industry — announced this yr it has developed one more model of a virtual person in a three way partnership with Haixi Media.
