At the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC 2024), the focus was on “Governing AI for Good and for All.” As such, the conference highlighted not just core technology, but also the creation of intelligent terminals through the use of AI as well as incorporating AI for application empowerment. The event brought together leading innovators from around the globe and Soul App was one of the participants.
As a prominent social platform in China, Soul is known to integrate AI technology into the app’s various interactive scenarios. For the event, Soul’s booth had the theme “Human Touch, Digital Heart,” and the team’s presentation revolved around the applications of AIGC in the social context.
The Soul App team unveiled three new features at the event — “Digital Twin,” “Werewolf Awakening,” and “EchoVerse”. Each of these was a striking example of how artificial intelligence can be blended with social interaction to create unique user experiences.
The feature “Digital Twin” is designed to help users create virtual representations of themselves for enhanced social engagement. It’s capable of analyzing chat histories and posts in public domain scenes and using this information to generate a digital twin that mirrors the user’s persona.
This feature allows for a highly personalized and efficient social experience in private chats, by offering intelligent reply recommendations and aiding in persona building. This innovation not only facilitates ice-breaking but also enriches social communication.
The second feature, Werewolf Awakening, an AI-enhanced game interaction scenario, showcased the platform’s multimodal capabilities. In this game, users can choose between AI and real players for an immersive experience. AI entities within the game possess autonomous reasoning, speech, decision-making, and disguise abilities, offering realistic and engaging gameplay.
Plus, these AI companions have access to the game strategies and outcomes of hundreds of players, which allows them to sharpen their playing skills. The AI gamers can communicate with their teammates explaining their moves and possible outcomes, so playing with them is just like partnering with human players. If that is not enough, these AI game bots also assist new users in navigating the complex rules of the werewolf game, making the experience both enjoyable and interactive and above all suitable and accessible for all.
The third feature, EchoVerse stood out as an independent application since the Soul App team positioned it as an AI social platform. Echoverse allows users to engage in real-time conversations with virtual characters. It customizes the personas, communication style, tone, and even the AI character’s voice as per requirement.
Users can choose to offer text descriptions of the AI characters they want to generate or use uploaded images. The next step involves picking the voice quality and communication style of the virtual person. It goes without saying that because the feature allows users to create characters with unique voices and personalities, it greatly enhances the multimodal interaction experience.
Another advantage of the EchoVerse feature is that it makes meaningful interactions available 24/7. After all, no matter how good and empathetic a friend is, no person can be available all the time every time. But, a virtual character has no such limitations. Also, the fact that these AI chat friends have access to a vast amount of information means that the conversation can take any direction that the user likes and it can be on any topic.
The Soul App team could introduce these revolutionary features exclusively because of the efforts the company has invested in building its technological strength, particularly in terms of artificial intelligence and related technologies such as Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC). The social platform got an early start on this front as AI was integrated into its many features since the inception of the app in 2016.
For instance, early on, the platform introduced the intelligent recommendation engine “Lingxi,” which uses comprehensive user profiles to connect individuals with similar interests. The decentralized mechanism of this feature allows for the creation of multiple relationship-building opportunities and provides instant emotional feedback. This significantly enhances user experience.
By 2020, artificial intelligence was firmly ingrained in the very fabric of Soul App. This was motivation enough for the team behind the social platform to embark on extensive research and development in AIGC (AI-generated content). The team’s efforts helped them to amass advanced capabilities in intelligent dialogue, image generation, and voice technology.
In 2023, Soul App unveiled its proprietary large language model, SoulX. The first of its kind to be used on a social platform, SoulX was capable of prompt-driven, contextually controlled content generation, and multimodal understanding. In fact, this model had a remarkably impressive ability for emotionally resonant and context-aware interactions, as such, it pushed the boundaries of AI in social contexts.
This year, Soul App launched its advanced voice generation model, integrating voice recognition, dialogue, and music generation capabilities. This comprehensive model supports real-time timbre generation, multilingual switching, voice DIY, and emotionally nuanced real-time dialogues, which further enrich the user experience.
These multimodal interaction capabilities have been seamlessly integrated into several of Soul App’s key features, including AI Godan, Werewolf Awakening, Digital Twin, and EchoVerse. These integrations have significantly improved interaction efficiency, quality, and experience, demonstrating the practical applications of advanced AI models in everyday social interactions.
Tao Ming, CTO of Soul App, further emphasized the platform’s commitment to sustainable AI interaction by stating that the willingness of Soul’s users to continuously engage with AI on the platform validates the app’s approach to ‘Synergic Model-application Interplay’”. Furthermore, he said that thus far AI has served as an ideal tool to meet users’ needs as it has helped the Soul team to gather real-time feedback and refine the platform’s numerous applications.
The statement signals that Soul App will continue to invest in the growth of AIGC technology and its applications. For users, this means that there will be more immersive and satisfying interaction opportunities on the platform.
