AI Empowers Digital Human To Intelligent Beings

The virtual human industry has reached a scale of hundreds of billions and is still in the early stages of development. Virtual humans originated in the film and television industry and gradually expanded into various fields such as entertainment, e-commerce, marketing, and enterprise services. Currently, it is still in the early stages of development. The industrial chain of virtual humans is mainly divided into three layers: the infrastructure layer (providing basic hardware and software for virtual humans), the platform layer (providing technical services for virtual human production and development, including AI companies, internet giants, and virtual technology solution providers), and the application layer (applications in various fields such as entertainment, e-commerce, finance, and tourism). According to predictions by "Quantum Bit," China's virtual human market is expected to reach 270 billion yuan in 2023.

⚫ AI technology breakthroughs have propelled virtual humans into a new development stage, transforming from "digital humans" to "intelligent beings" with enhanced interactive capabilities. Artificial intelligence technology permeates all aspects of virtual humans, including modeling, rendering, generation, and driving. Recent technological breakthroughs in AI and GC (Generative Chat) have, on one hand, reduced the production costs, shortened the production cycle, and lowered the barriers for creating digital humans. On the other hand, multimodal AI technology will elevate the interactive capabilities of digital humans, making their thinking, decision-making, and language output more human-like (beyond being just digital "shells," incorporating an intelligent "soul"). Major platforms such as Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent, and Douyin have already started providing digital human services. Based on the solutions offered by these platforms, it can be inferred that the future implementation of virtual humans will mainly take the form of: broadcasting-type digital humans (generating videos based on text to enhance content generation efficiency), interactive digital humans (with wide-ranging applications covering both the B2B and B2C markets), and intelligent voice assistants (deployable on IoT devices).

⚫ Low-cost virtual human solutions are gradually entering the market, with the potential to rapidly expand the target audience. Previously, the production and operation costs of digital humans were high, limiting their adoption mainly to large enterprises and organizations. However, as the technology for digital humans becomes more standardized and modular, standardized digital human solutions for small and medium-sized businesses are gradually emerging, resulting in significantly reduced prices. For example, "Wanxing Bopao" provides digital human short video broadcasting services for an annual fee of only thousands of yuan, while "Tencent Zhiying" offers a digital human SaaS tool enabling customized image and voice generation for an annual cost of tens of thousands of yuan. Tencent Zhiying will soon launch a digital human live broadcasting solution at a "thousand yuan per month" level in April.

⚫ Virtual humans have a wide range of application scenarios (e-commerce, marketing, entertainment, enterprise services, etc.), and their implementation is expected to accelerate in the near future. With the decrease in production costs and the improvement of interactive capabilities, the application of virtual humans is rapidly expanding. In the e-commerce sector, Wanxing Technology provides digital human broadcasting services to help businesses quickly generate short videos for sales. In the live streaming field, some merchants on the Douyin platform are already using 2D hyper-realistic digital humans for live streaming sales, with daily costs as low as hundreds of yuan. In the marketing field, services such as virtual human brand endorsements and custom virtual image creation for enterprises have gradually matured over the past 2-3 years. With the improvement of interactive capabilities, virtual humans are expected to participate in more aspects of marketing. In sectors such as finance, government affairs, and tourism, companies are already offering AI digital human products.