Inside Google's Beam Lab, an AI face appears

"They tell me no one outside Google has seen what we're about to see. No journalist has ever been in this building. Here in Google's Mountain View labs, the company's creating lifesize AI agents that can see you, and talk to you. This one's name is Sophie."

"It can speak any number of languages. It can see me, and almost everything else in the room. It can read, if I hold up my phone, a piece of paper, or a book. And of course, it can do Google-y things like pull up maps, recommend restaurants, check the weather, look up simple facts - only now with a woman's face, a dark turtleneck, and an attempt at body language."

"Beam, if you'll recall, is the company's moderately mindblowing teleconferencing hardware that makes people feel like their conversation partner is right in front of them in stunning glasses-free 3D. The first Google Beam product is the $25,000 HP Dimension. Its six cameras don't actually send video of another person. Instead, AI servers combine them into a volumetric 3D projection of a person - basically, the most lifelike video game character I've ever seen."

"Sophie, unfortunately, is not in 3D yet, and "she" is not a character either - at least not with the limited feature set Google has enabled today. Like any second-gen chatbot, Sophie is here to mirror me, to unconvincingly act excited by everything I say, to act as my subservient concierge. Sophie always speaks after a"

Google is experimentally revealing “Beam video agents” as a way to enable real-time communication with AI agents using Google Beam. Beam teleconferencing hardware creates a glasses-free 3D volumetric projection of a person by combining six cameras into a lifelike 3D model. The demonstration includes an AI agent named Sophie that can speak multiple languages, see the user and much of the room, and read text from a phone or book. Sophie can also perform typical Google tasks such as maps, restaurant recommendations, weather checks, and simple fact lookups, presented with a woman’s face and an attempt at body language. The current version is limited and not yet fully 3D or character-like.

Read at The Verge