An AI replica of Chinese swimmer Zhang Yufei at China House. (Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn)
Chinese tech company iFlytek is making waves at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games by showcasing its latest artificial intelligence technologies at China House, a pavilion located in the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild in Paris.
The main attraction of China House is two virtual Chinese athletes: swimmer Zhang Yufei and gymnast Zou Jingyuan, AI replicas. These virtual athletes are almost indistinguishable from their real-life counterparts, and attract visitors’ attention with their realistic appearance and expressions. The AI characters greet visitors with phrases such as “Hello, I’m Zhang Yufei, nice to meet you!”, creating an experience that almost feels like interacting with real athletes.
These AI athletes are equipped with advanced AI technologies including speech synthesis, speech recognition, semantic understanding, lip movement prediction and image processing, developed by iFlytek. Even in the busy and noisy environment of the pavilion, they can accurately capture visitors’ speech and respond appropriately, thanks to sophisticated multi-speaker speech recognition technology, iFlytek said.
Impressively, the AI versions of Zhang Yufei and Zou Jingyuan can seamlessly switch between Chinese, English and French, interacting with athletes and visitors from around the world without the need for translation devices, iFlytek added.
According to the company, this ability to handle a multitude of questions from diverse cultural backgrounds demonstrates the power of its multilingual intelligent voice technology.
