ChatGPT might have taken the internet by storm, but it’s still very limited in how you interact with it. But the chatbots of the future may not be so limited. In fact they may even have human-like avatars you can hold a spoken conversation with, rather than being forced to type and read messages.
I spoke to one company, Israeli firm D-ID, about this possibility over at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. D-ID is all about creating digital people, of a sort, and right now that means adding a more human connection to AI chatbots—something it hopes to accomplish with the launch of its new API.
According to D-ID CEO and co-founder Gil Perry, humans aren’t wired for conversations that only rely on text or audio. Instead, having a human face (or at least a representation of it) makes everything more engaging and natural — and in multiple languages to boot.
Plus, from a business perspective, having an AI person doing a bunch of stuff for you saves you the cost of hiring actual people. Whether that’s conversing with customers, training employees, or anything else that AIs can handle in their current state.
Right now people tend to be pretty skeptical and wary about AI, and Perry suggested this faceless nature might be part of the reason. Adding a human face could help people feel more comfortable conversing with a chatbot, even if they know there isn’t a human being at the other end of the call.
That was particularly true of the speaking animations. Everything wasn’t quite in sync, and at times it looked more like random mouth flapping than an avatar trying to vocalize sound—which it obviously isn’t actually doing.
I also noticed a few obvious delays in the speech recognition and writing as the bot was interacting with people. But that doesn’t change the fact you could speak to the bot, have it understand what you’re saying and offer up a response without you having to type or read a single thing.
