If you reject her marketing advances, maybe she will cry but still reward you with a hand gesture of her heart.
She is 22, born in Beijing, loves winter sports, and she is passionate and outspoken when interacting with sports fans. Meet Dong Dong, the official virtual influencer for the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 (“Games”).
Created with cloud-driven advanced technology, Dong Dong is a digital persona created to engage with fans of the Olympic Winter Games and promote Games-related merchandise.
Endowed with a natural human voice rich with emotions; a lithe athletic physique for showing off upbeat dance moves; and a dynamic personality with which to enchant sports fans, Dong Dong is a cloud native. Created with advanced AI, Natural Language Processing, Emotional Speech Synthesis, advanced 3D graphics and cloud-based data-driven features, she hosts livestreaming shows where she engages the audience with a range of realistic facial expressions, verbal responses to questions, and physical reactions such as giving a thumbs-up, posting heart-shaped hand gestures and even 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 dance routines in sync with the Olympic theme songs to cheer for the Olympians. What is more, her actions are scripted entirely by cloud technologies, according to one of her creators, Xiaolong Li, at Alibaba Virtual Human & Intelligent Customer Service.
“… We developed Dong Dong with the hope that (she) can create better engagement with the younger, digital natives in an exciting and natural way. In the future, we will push technology boundaries even further… and find new ways to engage with audiences through immersive experiences or a metaverse-style setting (at) large-scale, global sports events like the Olympic Games, virtual conferences or 3D exhibition tours. In addition, they can be very helpful with their practical capability as diligent, smart and efficient assistants to the reporters,” Li said.
