AI-driven Virtual Avatars: The new paradigm of customer service

What began as simple representations in early Internet forums has evolved into more realistic versions with applications in a variety of industries.

In fact, according to GrandView Research, the global digital avatar market, valued at $14.34 billion in 2022, is expected to reach $270.61 billion by 2033. Sectors such as healthcare, industrial, or marketing are the ones that can obtain more potential and results, but their benefits can cover many more, we explain everything!

Virtual Agents and Avatars

Extended reality (XR) has ushered in an exciting era of immersive interaction, allowing users to see, hear, and interact with virtual content as if it were part of their physical environment.

This paradigm shift to realistic virtual environments naturally extends our desire for virtual agents that emulate human communication and interaction. As such, developing such intelligent virtual agents is paramount for future XR systems, with potential benefits in applications such as customer services, professional work environments, and video games.

Agents represent a human figure created by software, while avatars usually represent a real person. Despite this small difference, both face several common challenges, such as appearance and movement, control mechanisms for interactivity and autonomy, gestures, locomotion, interaction, cooperation, coordination, etc.

Benefits of Virtual Avatars

Looking back just three years, there were few tools to create ultra-realistic avatars and motion capture techniques were not available to everyone. The advent of generative AI has changed this completely.

Generative AI is making it possible to reproduce human cognitive functions, so AI-powered avatars can hold a natural conversation with a human being and attempt to show emotions.

Some of its most important benefits are:

• Better customer experience: virtual avatars have been a small revolution in the world of customer service. Thanks to AI, virtual assistants are available 24/7, providing a powerful tool for creating a more effective experience at a lower cost.
• Assistance: virtual avatars are becoming increasingly popular in the field of training and education. They are a support, like a private tutor, who can help to review lessons, but who is also able to give personalized classes adapted to each student. They are also very useful in the healthcare field, where they can help patients and reduce delays in processes.
• Personalization: these avatars can collect and analyze a large amount of user data. This process facilitates the identification of potential customers’ requirements and expectations, allowing companies to adopt a personalized approach when interacting with their audiences.
• Improved brand image: companies can create customized avatars that represent their brand and use them on online platforms to increase brand recognition.
• Better representation of products and services: proper product awareness is critical to improve sales and overall business progress. Virtual avatars allow you to show these products and services in a realistic and detailed way, allowing potential consumers to learn about each feature.
• Increased engagement: Dynamic animations captivate users by making interactions more visually appealing. As a result, users are more likely to stay engaged and attentive when avatars display more realistic behaviors and movements.

Main features for AI-driven Virtual Avatars

In the constantly evolving landscape of digital interaction, companies need to move towards innovative solutions that resonate with their audience and differentiate them in the competitive marketplace.

Digital avatars are undergoing many changes, and several characteristics are essential to transforming the way companies connect with their users:

GPT-driven conversations

The integration of GPT into conversations represents a breakthrough, as it gives avatars the ability to interact with users in contextually relevant dialogues.

Avatars with GPT technologies are excellent at understanding the context of a conversation, as they can capture details, infer meanings, and maintain continuity in dialogues.

Language generation capabilities enable avatars to produce text that is not only grammatically correct but also contextually appropriate. This ensures that avatar-generated responses are accurate and mimic human communication, as well as continually refining their understanding of users’ language patterns and preferences as they interact with them.

Their versatility to engage in multifaceted conversations makes them well-suited for applications ranging from customer service to educational and entertainment platforms.

Realistic animations

Realistic animations are a fundamental feature of avatars, revolutionizing the way users interact with virtual entities. It may seem simple, but dynamic animations are what “bring avatars to life,” providing them with fluid movements and expressive actions that elevate the overall virtual experience.

Dynamic animations allow avatars to perform realistic gestures, which adds a layer of realism to interactions, enhancing interactivity. This allows them to recognize the user’s presence, react to specific commands, or respond to environmental stimuli, creating an engaging and responsive virtual environment.

Perfect integration

Seamless integration promises a harmonious merging of virtual entities with existing platforms, workflows, and user experience. This ensures that avatars become an integral part of a user’s digital journey without causing disruption, delivering consistent and unified interaction across multiple touchpoints.

A seamlessly integrated AI-powered avatar adapts seamlessly to different platforms: websites, mobile apps, or virtual environments. Regardless of the space, the avatar maintains consistent functionality and appearance, ensuring a cohesive experience.

Integration extends beyond surface-level compatibility, allowing avatars to align with existing workflows. This synchronization enables a seamless transition for users, allowing them to interact with the avatar on different devices, but without losing context.

Multilingual capabilities

The ability of an avatar to communicate in different languages completely revolutionizes the way companies can connect with diverse audiences around the world. Avatars equipped with multilingual capabilities break down language barriers, thus extending the reach of virtual interactions to a global audience.

This capability goes beyond simple translations but encompasses an understanding of linguistic details, cultural contexts, and regional variations. These switch seamlessly between languages in real-time based on user preferences or contextual cues.

Beyond text-based interactions, they support multimodal communication, including speech synthesis and speech recognition in multiple languages.

Privacy and Security

An essential point in virtual avatars is privacy and security, which are essential to protect users’ sensitive data and comply with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

Avatars use advanced encryption and data anonymization to ensure confidentiality and security during transmission and storage. In addition, they implement strong authentication and regular audits to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities.

This generates user confidence, as well as compliance, minimizes the risk of breaches, enhances organizational reputation, and a competitive advantage over other similar companies.

Predictive capabilities

Predictive nudges optimize interactions by anticipating user needs and preferences by analyzing behavioral patterns. These avatars use Machine Learning algorithms to provide contextual, personalized, and timely reminders that enhance the user experience.

This increases engagement by guiding users to relevant actions, improves satisfaction by offering personalized suggestions, optimizes conversion rates, or creates personalized marketing opportunities aligned with user interests.

AI Avatar Generator

To create realistic avatars, it is crucial to collect accurate information about human form and movement. Marker-based motion capture, known as “mocap,” is the most reliable method for this.

This process involves transforming a sparse, raw 3D point cloud into usable data. Initially, the data is cleaned and labeled by assigning 3D points to specific marker locations on the human body.

A major challenge in capturing extensive motion capture data is the labeling process, which, despite using the best commercial solutions, often requires manual intervention. Issues such as markers and noise can complicate matters, especially when new marker sets are employed or when humans interact with the objects.

On the other hand, facial capture data is vital for building realistic human models. However data capture is only the first step in creating virtual avatars, as modeling involves transforming the captured data into a parametric model that can be manipulated, sampled, and animated, with a focus on varying human shape and movement according to different poses.

The next step would involve texturing and shading the avatar to achieve a realistic look. This includes applying textures that simulate materials such as skin, hair, and clothing.

Finally, the avatar is animated and integrated into digital applications or robotic systems.

Example of an AI-driven Virtual Avatar

With this demand and aspirations for real-time responsive virtual agents, many professionals are trying to achieve the level of naturalness and realism required. One of them is Plain Concepts.

To overcome the current limitations of virtual agents, we have developed an avatar system based on Machine Learning, capable of interacting naturally with users using multimodal signals in real-time.

An example is the avatar we have developed for the IFMIF-DONES project, the new particle accelerator being built in Granada. This virtual 3D avatar, which can be shared through Microsoft Teams, and which is being trained with project-specific information, can be used to interact naturally with users.

We have used proprietary technology for the creation of interactive 3D avatars, which allows the user to communicate naturally with the virtual assistant. The avatar is able to listen and respond in natural language using an artificial voice. The understanding and generation of coherent answers to the user’s questions are processed by the most advanced AI technology on the market at the moment, provided by OpenAI and Microsoft.

The avatar has a realistic 3D appearance, able to gesticulate and pronounce the answers imitating the human voice, simulating a natural conversation with the user, which enhances interaction and engagement.

The AI has been developed on Microsoft Azure and the pre-training has been done with texts provided by the client, achieving a specific context of the project. In addition, the application is compatible with Microsoft Windows operating systems and can be run on any PC or laptop with a mid-range or high-end graphics card.

One of the main challenges we faced was to get an avatar with all kinds of facial expressions, for which we relied on Microsoft’s viseme collection (different positions of the mouth when pronouncing the most important phonemes) to be able to animate in real-time the avatar’s mouth. From here, we needed a realistic avatar, based on a realistic look, expressing all kinds of emotions and reflecting human attitudes.

The goal was to get a clean interface, so that most of the UI when you are talking to the avatar, was the avatar itself. For example, we have given it the expression of “thinking” so that when the server is processing the answer, a simple “Loading” does not appear, but we are in front of an avatar with an expression of thinking.

For this, we have done many motion capture tests, achieving very realistic and natural animations that simulate human facial expressions. As a DNA chain, to fill in “the gaps” left by Microsoft’s Cognitive Services animation services, we worked with the Plain Concepts design team to stage different situations and scenarios that the avatar could face. We mixed different types of blending with all kinds of animations to make the avatar feel more natural.

With all this, we put together a “cocktail” of technologies, where to create the avatar we used:

• Speech-to-Text AI to convert audio files into text transcripts as well as recognize speech.
• Neural Voice to reproduce the human voice.
• Our Evergine graphics engine for the 3D appearance of the avatar.
• Azure OpenAI for response intelligence and text-to-speech conversion.
• .NET MAUI for visual interface and compatibility with iOS and Android.

And since a picture is worth a thousand words, here you can see how “Silvia” acts when you ask her to explain the Granada particle accelerator project in English in detail:

As a conclusion, advances in AI are offering promising solutions that can captivate users and at a much lower cost than a few years ago.

At Plain Concepts we merge the latest GenAI tools with our proprietary technology to bring your ideas to life. Our experts will help you explore the full potential of intelligent platforms to create a solution tailored to your specific needs and give a new meaning to your business. Contact us and we will show you all that the world of digital avatars can offer you!