Jul 1, 2022|
JD Cloud’s Digital Human Technology Passes Assessment
by Doris Liu
The Yanxi (言犀) multimodal digital human platform developed by JD Cloud was announced on June 21 to be one of the first eight companies in China to pass the capability assessment of such systems by an official research institute.
The assessment is based on the “Digital Human System Basic Capability Requirements and Assessment Method”, a benchmark highly recognized by the industry, which is a standard formulated by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) with leading domestic Internet companies and key industry enterprises.
The three dimensions of basic capabilities in technology, engineering and security guarantee were evaluated comprehensively for the participating digital humans, involving indicators such as voice technology capability, interaction technology capability, standard resource allocation, content traceability and content risk control.
The multimodal digital human platform of Yanxi, JD Cloud’s intelligent customer service system, integrates multiple technologies such as acoustic speech recognition (ASR) and multi-turn dialogue to generate natural speech, human-like facial expression and body posture, as well as offering an immersive experience to users.
Yanxi’s digital human, positioned to improve industrial service experience, is developed from complex scenarios provided by JD’s businesses in retail, supply chain, cloud computing and more.
During this year’s 618 Grand Promotion, two virtual anchors, Jing Maimai from JD and Du Xiaoxiao from Chinese internet search engine company Baidu, joined hands to interpret the shopping bonanza’s consumption trends. During the broadcast, Jing Maimai presented in a lifelike way with smooth facial expressions and body motions to catch the audience’s attention.
Another example is Qian Yan (芊言), JD’s first intelligent digital human engaged in customer service in the retail sector. With technology integration of ASR, Natural Language Processing (NLP), speech synthesis (or Text-to-Speech, TTS), real-time rendering and so on, Qian Yan is able to handle various kinds of sale-related queries, enabling 24/7 continuous service.
Furthermore, the Yanxi digital human is also adopted in many other scenarios like finance and public administration to help an array of industries upgrade to digital intelligence.
The technology embedded in the Yanxi digital human platform has been widely recognized, winning the best presentation award at the international conference ACM Multimedia 2021, with about 130 papers being published at top international AI conferences such as NeurIPS, CVPR, AAAI and ACL. Moreover, JD previously won the IEEE Signal Processing Best Paper Award and Super AI Leader Award (SAIL Award) at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) for this technology.
As the emerging metaverse concept accelerates the process of aligning business and technology, JD’s Yanxi system will continue to explore more possibilities to apply digital human technology in wider practical scenarios, benefiting thousands of professions and industries.