SHE is a passionate, outspoken Beijing-born 22-year-old woman who loves winter sports. She looks the part too. Intense stares, a chiseled chin and cheeks, and rosy fair skin define Dong Dong, a “virtual” influencer that was developed and created by the Alibaba DAMO Academy to connect with Olympic fans, especially the younger, tech-savvy generation.
The Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 which is set to end on February 20 began on a “cool” note with the introduction of AI-powered Dong Dong, as she made her debut to engage with Olympic fans during livestreaming of various games.
Alibaba’s DAMO Academy is Alibaba Group’s global research initiative. The team made Dong Dong to have authentic human-like features, sparkling personality, as well as her specialty to interact with audiences in an engaging manner.
Among her many talents, Dong Dong not only promotes Olympic merchandise which can be bought in the official Olympic shop in China on Tmall during her dedicated livestreaming shows, but she can also respond to questions in a lively, natural human voice with different emotions, along with various body gestures from giving a thumbs-up to posting heart-shape gesture and wiping away tears of disappointment.
In addition, 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. All these engaging interactions are powered by Cloud-based digital technologies.
“Our ambition is to use Cloud technology to give the Olympic Winter Games a digital uplift and to deliver Olympic Winter Games experiences relating to Cloud and e-commerce platform services to fans in a creative way. That’s why we developed Dong Dong, with the hope that the Cloud-based virtual influencer can create better engagement with the younger, digital natives in an exciting and natural way,” Xiaolong Li, Leader of Alibaba Virtual Human & Intelligent Customer Service explained.
To realize this virtual influencer’s dynamic personality, human-like glamour and natural voice, 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.
Powered by Cloud computing and AI technologies, she can look, speak and act like a young woman with lively personality. Meanwhile, Alibaba’s multimodal algorithms, which leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP), Emotional Speech Synthesis and computer vision on the Cloud, 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.
“In the future, we will push technology boundaries even further to create an enthralling mixed reality. Digital personas or virtual influencers will find new ways to engage with their audience through immersive experiences or a metaverse-style setting, whether during large-scale, global sports events like the Olympic Games, virtual conferences or 3D exhibition tours. In addition, they can also be very helpful with their practical capability as diligent, smart and efficient assistants to the reporters,” Li added.
