#ai-avatars

#ai-avatars

When you open your Peacock mobile app this summer, you might see the AI likeness of TV host Andy Cohen pop up on your homepage. In an announcement on Friday, NBCUniversal said Cohen's avatar will serve as a guide through Peacock's 'infinitely swipeable' feed of clips from Bravo shows, like Love Island, The Real Housewives series, and Below Deck.

A California-based tech company is pitching exactly that by building AI avatars of every Major League Baseball star. The AI firm Genies recently signed an intellectual property deal with MLB Players Inc. the business arm of the Major League Baseball Players Association to create a cartoon-like "companion" version of every player on the league's roster. Once the product officially launches, baseball fans will supposedly be able to hold a conversation with the avatars on the Genies website,

"Alta's own app also features thousands of brands that users can shop from," Wang said.

A British AI startup that makes realistic video avatars has almost doubled its valuation to $4bn (3bn), in a boost for the UK technology sector. Synthesia was valued at $2.1bn last year and moved into new offices in central London, marking the moment with a ceremony attended by the Sadiq Khan, the city's mayor, and Peter Kyle, then technology secretary. On Monday, it announced its latest funding round, led by an existing investor, Google Ventures, had raised $200m and valued the British company at $4bn.

Every player at this summer's World Cup will have their own physically accurate AI avatar that will be used in taking VAR decisions. The innovation, which will involve every player being digitally scanned and leaves the possibility of size mattering in future offside calls, was part of a package of technological measures announced by Fifa's president, Gianni Infantino, as he made a keynote appearance at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas.

The bot is trained on a range of materials, including Dalio's books and public speeches. The hedge fund titan has described it as the natural extension of the computing partners he developed decades ago at the company he founded. It "is consistent with my current main goal in life, which is to pass along what I have that can be valuable to others," he has said.

DirecTV has partnered with Glance, an artificial intelligence company, to allow people using its Gemini devices to see AI-generated screensavers featuring their own faces. Glance, owned by a mobile ad company, said it will add this new AI feature to DirecTV Gemini devices in 2026. If you own a Gemini device -- either the Gemini, which works via , or the Gemini Air dongle if you're a customer -- the TV screensaver will allow you to create an AI avatar of yourself.

Zoom's vision of filling meetings with AI clones has nearly arrived. On Wednesday, the video conferencing app announced that you'll soon be able to create a "photorealistic" avatar of yourself in case you aren't "camera-ready." That means your AI avatar can appear polished if you've just crawled out of bed. Zoom plans on launching this feature to Workplace users in December, allowing you to generate an AI lookalike based on a photo of yourself that you upload or capture directly in the app.

They're giving interviews advocating for tougher gun laws, such as when the family of Joaquin Oliver, a victim of the 2018 Parkland school shooting in Florida, created a beanie-wearing AI avatar of him and had it speak with journalist Jim Acosta in July. "This is just another advocacy tool to create that urgency of making things change," Manuel Oliver, Joaquin's father, told NPR.

The salesperson hawking Brother printers on Taobao works hard-like, really hard. At any time of the day, even when there's no audience on the Chinese ecommerce platform, the same woman wearing a white shirt and black skirt is always livestreaming, boasting about the various features of different office printers. She has a phone in one hand and often checks it as if to read a sales script or monitor the viewer comments coming in.

We’re essentially a technology digital team for any business... with particular agents that have particular functions. We just need general ideas on what to do.

Zoom has launched a standalone app for Meta Quest headsets, allowing users to join or host meetings in virtual reality as their Meta Avatar, with support for all Zoom licenses.

The process made me feel vulnerable, like I was giving the computer a piece of me.