Volcengine (火山引擎), the AI and cloud services platform from ByteDance, the tech company behind TikTok, is said to be preparing to launch a “next gen” digital human platform.
Named “奇美拉” (lit. Chimaera), the platform is reportedly in an invite-only closed testing phase and is currently free to use. The report also says that it is expected to enter public testing by the end of the month. Developed by ByteDance’s smart generative digital human team, it leverages technological support, primarily AI large language models (LLMs) from Volcengine, to provide digital humans, outfit changes via image and video translation services, etc. Prices will be based on usage and the length of videos generated. However, ByteDance has not yet responded to the claims.
Volcengine has been actively expanding its presence in the digital human sector since 2022, when it received a license for digital humans from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT). In April 2023, the platform launched its digital human products described as “good at listening”, “able to speak,” and “capable of thinking”. It has since released multiple solutions for finance, livestream and marketing. In February, ByteDance unveiled its latest end-to-end multimodal AI digital human, the Ominihuman, which can turn single images into life-like moving visuals that can speak, sing and move naturally.
During the recent 618 Shopping Festival, Baidu debuted its digital human avatar of top streamer and entrepreneur Luo Yonghao. Luo’s digital doppelgänger spoke and moved naturally to an AI-generated script. During the 7-hour stream, over 1.3 million people tuned in, and the gross merchandise value (GMV) reached 5.5 million RMB (766,443.70 USD). With Volcengine’s Doubao LLM (豆包大模型) expanding its services across sectors, the new digital human platform will likely serve as another piece of the puzzle in monetising LLMs for ByteDance.