It was bound to happen: An artificial intelligence (AI) version of Old Nick is coming to virtual town.
AI Santa, the world’s first fully AI conversational-video face, features a Santa who watches, listens and delivers verdicts with unsettling precision.
“It’s built to have a conversation as you would with a human, and not just make simple transactions,” Quinn Favret, co-founder of Tavus, said in an interview. “It’s not a back and forth with data, but an understanding. If you tell Santa, for instance, that you burned down a village, he will admonish you for being naughty. It feels truly human.”
Tavus is working with a gamut of companies that would embed its API into products for anything from interviewing job applicants and teaching, to creating personalities for celebrity clones that interact with fans.
AI Santa’s creator, Tavus, is backed by Y Combinator, Sequoia and Peter Thiel. Its goal is to imagine a new way to interact with Santa, who does more than chat. He watches, listens and delivers verdicts with unsettling precision.
Virtual Santa is the latest addition to a growing legion of robots and humanoids that are capturing the public’s (and businesses) imagination. The highest-profile example, Tesla Inc.’s Optimus Bot has been gaining dexterity and fluidity of movement across challenging terrain. A new video shows Optimus walking over bumpy grass and through forested areas.
Robots, whether virtual or physical, are on the rise, especially in the manufacturing space.
Chinese robotic startup MagicLab, also known as Magic Atom Robotics Technology, has developed a fleet of collaborative humanoids called MagicBots to inspect products, handle materials and perform other basic warehouse duties at factories.
One robot, for example, transfers a package to another robot at a workstation after lifting it from the assembly line. The second robot removes components from the box and transfers them to processing machinery.
MagicLab is among a slew of companies deploying robots in industrial settings, search and rescue operations and logistics. China is leading the pack in a push to mass-produce humanoids by 2025 and dominate the market by 2027.
Another maker of humanoids, French startup Pollen Robotics, says it plans to debut Reachy 2 at the sprawling CES show in Las Vegas in January.
Pollen Robotics will be showcasing a modular, open source AI platform designed to bridge academic research and real-world applications.
