Digital Human Solutions: COVID-19 Triggers the Next Phase of AI Evolution

When people think of digital humans, they imagine some form of Siri or Alexa evolving up to Terminator-like cyborgs, while others are quick to visualize Ava from the movie Ex Machina. These thoughts might not be entirely fictional, but there is still time for AI-enabled solutions to reach that stage. However, digital human solutions (DHS) are a reality that exist today.

Digital Human Solutions: The Future Is Here

The global chatbot market has seen exponential advancements in technology and implementation. Conventional chatbots provide customers with simulated human conversations through voice commands or text chats or both. Digital Human Solutions provide end-users with the option of visual interaction in addition to conversational chatbot features.

The demand for Digital Human Solutions is increasing as enterprises realize that customers prefer to have a unique, customized and personal interaction when speaking to chatbots.

These solutions are able to provide natural language understanding capability, interpret and exhibit emotions (such as sadness, anger and empathy) and can interact with customers in a dynamic environment, which makes the experience more customized and realistic.

These solutions ‘humanize’ chatbots, augmenting natural language processing (NLP) functionalities in a more personalized manner and creating a certain level of emotional connect with the user.

Key Issues Addressed by DHS in the Industry

There is a focused push by governments on researching and advancing the adoption of AI-enabled solutions across industries, which has led to increased funding and advancement for the industry. Digital Human Solutions suppliers are expected to observe an approximate annual growth rate of 30% over the next few years.

These solutions enable organizations to provide improved user experiences by understanding and responding to empathy features from end-users, respond with high accuracy by enabling self-learning within the solution, cut down on operational expenses and improve the efficiency of the process by leveraging AI/ML technology

Market Scenario and Application of DHS

Most markets that have been impacted by COVID lockdowns are now trying to leverage technology to bring about operational efficiency and lower costs. The global user-base is estimated to be at 200 million units for digital human solutions.

The supplier market for DHS comprises of vendors such as Uneeq Digital, Soul Machines, Samsung Neon and Magic Leap, amongst others who either have a market ready product or have betas in development. These suppliers provide photo-realistic human versions of the solution with cloud-based deployment, driving the adoption of these solutions across regions.

Aimee from Uneeq Digital provides customers with 24x7 support and guidance, Florence from Soul Machines has resulted in 40% query resolution with no human intervention and Cotoha from IP Soft for NTT Communications has improved customer engagement levels leading to 20x increase in conversion rates from their website.

Some other key use cases for DHS include providing customers with human-realistic interaction and responses to their queries. Uneeq provides digital humans for specific customer-oriented roles such as customer assistant, sales concierge and financial advisor. Digital human influencers provide companies with unique brand ambassadors forever such as Lil Miquella, a digital human influencer on Instagram.

What Does the Future Hold?

Presently, these digital human solutions are at a nascent stage. Suppliers such as Neon have outlined plans to work towards creating digital humans that can act independently and behave as a friend to the end-user.

Digital Human Solutions that will significantly impact this segment in the future could include innovations such as creating a design with human realistic skin making them indistinguishable from humans in appearance, expanding emotional quotient by extending the range of emotions that can be interpreted and expressed by these solutions, developing no-code DHS that will enable businesses to customize and create characters at their end without vendor support and giving businesses the option of conducting training for employees using DHS completely without human involvement.

This segment is expected to grow significantly, with key growth focused around pharmaceuticals, sales and financial services in the immediate future.

Sources and References

• https://www.fintechnews.org/turning-ai-chatbots-into-digital-humans/
• https://digitalhumans.com/casestudies/salasai-x-nzfw/
• https://itelligencegroup.com/in-en/global-blog/how-can-digital-humans-improve-customer-service/
• https://freshdesk.com/customer-support/chatbots-vs-humans-blog/
• https://digitalagencynetwork.com/meet-liv-the-new-virtual-ambassador-for-renault-kadjar-escaping-to-real/
• https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/lil-miquela-digital-avatar-instagram-influencer.html
• https://www.ntt.com/en/services/application/cotoha.html
• https://www.digitalistmag.com/customer-experience/2020/05/06/ai-chatbots-versus-human-customer-service-06203645/