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I created an interactive digital avatar of myself
Confirmed
In Short: Synthesia, a digital avatar startup, recently launched Roleplay Sessions, allowing employees to practice sales pitches with an interactive AI avatar.
Google has launched Live Avatar, a new feature that integrates real-time video generation with speech models to provide more engaging customer service and interactive walkthroughs.
The technology, part of Gemini 3.8 Live, allows enterprises to offer more personalized and interactive virtual services.
According to Google, Live Avatar can adapt its lip-syncing and expressions as it switches between languages, providing a seamless experience.
Live Avatar processes visual and audio inputs simultaneously, answering with expressive audio and video in near real time.
In a demonstration, Google showed how the avatar could check in a hotel guest while continuing the conversation without interruption.
Marianne Johnson, executive vice president and chief product officer of Cox Automotive, said, “Shoppers increasingly expect to describe what they need in their own words rather than work through filters and menus. Autotrader’s new conversational AI Avatar brings that experience to vehicle discovery by matching natural conversation to the right inventory.”
Live Avatar is designed to provide “engaging customer service” or “interactive walkthroughs” with the help of precise lip-syncing, natural expressions, and fluid turn-taking.
Google Cloud advises customers to work with its sales representatives for provisioned throughput, customized deployment architectures, and custom-avatar allowlisting.
Synthesia’s interactive avatar technology is part of a growing trend in the digital avatar space, alongside startups like D-ID, HeyGen, and Colossyan.
What this adds
Google's Live Avatar technology is designed to provide a more comprehensive and engaging experience for users, adapting to real-time inputs and switching languages seamlessly.
Synthesia's interactive avatar technology, which allows users to practice sales pitches and receive feedback, is part of a broader trend in the digital avatar space.
Background
Synthesia's interactive avatar technology is part of a growing trend in the digital avatar space, alongside startups like D-ID, HeyGen, and Colossyan. These companies are pushing the boundaries of AI and virtual interactions.
What's confirmed
- Google has announced that it is rolling out Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar, a visual persona that combines real-time video generation with speech models.
What's still developing
- Synthesia lets enterprises build interactive training videos with AI avatars and recently launched a product called Roleplay Sessions that lets employees practice, for example, sales pitches with an interactive AI avatar that responds and scores their responses.
- Overall, Synthesia builds three types of products — a video-creation and distribution platform with classic avatars, where someone types in a script and the avatar repeats it; an agentic platform called Sessions where people can interact with the avatars in surveys or roleplay; and an API platform where people can take Synthesia video and voice models and combine them with other tech services to build interactive avatars or other types of products.
- Then I showed them my interactive one, which is deterministic, meaning it will only say what it was trained to respond to.
- But Alexandru’s avatar was beyond that — this seemed to me the final boss of using AI in PR.
- When I went to the new office opening and they asked me if I would like my own AI avatar, I didn’t even hesitate to say yes.
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- Opal Records was put on hiatus in 1991, having helped forge Eno's reputation as a revolutionary musician and created a collaborative space for artists hoping to redefine atmospheric popular music.
- Outside of their visual presence, Live Avatars are powered by Gemini’s advanced reasoning and asynchronous tool calling.
- If you hate talking to AI support bots, maybe you’ll change your tune after they get a Live Avatar update.
- This allows the avatar to trigger tool calls and fetch data in the background without interrupting the conversation.
- For example, you could ask the avatar to check you into a hotel as you talk about other matters.