Getting an interactive AI avatar of herself made by Synthesia

[Millie98]

This is a fascinating piece about getting her own digital twin made by Synthesia, the UK founded avatar startup. The interactive version of her is trained only on one of her stories, about why venture backed startups appear to commit more fraud than companies without VC money. Readers can talk to it through the article and ask it things like why she wrote the piece. It will not go off script and politely steers every question back to that story

The process sounds surprisingly quick. She sat in a mini studio at Synthesia's new New York office, had lots of photos taken and recorded around two minutes of her voice. After giving consent, the team built a personal avatar that reads scripts and two interactive ones, with and without glasses. It took a couple of days to put together

Under the hood it is a chain of models. Speech gets turned into text, a language model works out a response, a voice model reads it back and Synthesia's own video model animates the face. Customers can swap in voice models from the likes of ElevenLabs, Google or OpenAI and host it on their own cloud. Synthesia hit a $4 billion valuation earlier this year, so there is clearly serious money behind this

The reactions from her friends and family are the best bit. Her friends found it interesting and creepy in equal measure, while her parents kept trying to catch it out with questions only they would know. Because it is deterministic, it refused and kept pointing them back to the fraud article. Her mum joked that she did not remember giving birth to two of them

What struck me is her own mixed feelings at the end. She points out that trust is the core of journalism and she cannot see that being handed to an AI. She also admits she can see how someone could get pulled into something unhealthy with a free roaming chatbot version. At least with an avatar, as she puts it, you can always log off

So would you want a digital twin of yourself? I can see the appeal for answering the same questions over and over, but I would feel uneasy knowing a version of me was chatting to strangers. Would you trust a news bulletin read by an avatar? Let's hear it

I created an interactive digital avatar of myself - and you can talk to it | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com