World’s First Digital Human Unveiled in Davos
On an icy January afternoon in Davos, the world met Rachel. She had bright blue eyes, an infectious smile, and an almost encyclopedic knowledge, and was happy to respond to any inquisitor with the right balance of immediacy and politeness. She may sound like the ideal person for any firm’s customer support team — barring an important detail. Rachel is not a person, but an incredibly realistic hologram with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, and she promises to become the personal assistant of the future.
Rachel is the result of an unorthodox marriage of creators. She owes her eerily lifelike appearance to the New Zealand animation company Soul Machines, whose founders have been recognized with two Oscars for their work in blockbusters King Kong and, quite suitably, Avatar. Her brainpower, on the other hand, is due to a cloud-based human computing engine developed by IBM Watson — an AI technology flexible enough to meet the demands of any firm who wishes to employ her as a tool in their customer support toolkit.
But her truly revolutionary trait, as explained by Soul Machine’s enthusiastic CBO Greg Cross during her launching presentation in this year’s WEF, is neither brain nor brawn.
“Rachel’s unique feature is,believe it or not, her empathy.” said Cross to a starry-eyed audience. “By using the latest facial recognition technology, she has the capacity to detect her customer’s emotion through every micro-expression, and respond appropriately”. Before the room exploded in a lengthy standing ovation, Rachel wittily added: “It makes me extremely happy to see your smile Mr. Cross.”
Though the world’s first digital human is still in its testing phase, Soul Machines have already stroke a partnership with 3D design software company Autodesk to incorporate Rachel into their online customer support system by as early as 2019. Cross also revealed that variations of Rachel are already being considered by eight additional “major brand names”, though he declined to publicly disclose them.
While the Davos audience and early testers have reported that they are incredibly happy with what they see, the one thing IBM and Soul Machines are worried about is their potential reluctance to “be seen”. “Despite Rachel’s exciting appearance, we are still asking customers to interact face-to-face with a robot that scrutinizes even their slightest facial reactions” said Cross, citing potential privacy concerns. “The real test will be whether people will want to give her a chance.”
It turns out that when they do, they are more than satisfied. A survey of 10,000 people who tested a pilot version of Rachel showed that more than 70% would be “happy for her to be their primary customer experience”. The results were so overwhelmingly positive, that they made her creators confident enough that the avatar will not simply be a niche, more sophisticated version of a chatbot. “We’re potentially looking at a revolutionized brand ambassador” said Cross.
Though Rachel’s official presentation in Davos helped her gain an army of enthusiasts, there were also a few discontents. A couple of journalists questioned the necessity of the anthropomorphic avatar, fearing that it could contribute to the already alarming unemployment rate caused by machine learning — a major concern in this year’s WEF.