The World's Most Watched TV Show Will Be Hosted By Artificial Intelligences

The World's Most Watched TV Show Will Be Hosted By Artificial IntelligencesObEN An audience of over one billion people worldwide is expected to tune into the Chinese state broadcaster's Spring Festival Gala marking the Chinese lunar new year on February 5. The four well-known human hosts – Beining Sa, Xun Zhu, Bo Gao, and Yang Long – will each be joined by an "AI copy" of themselves – in effect, their very own digital twin. The "personal artificial intelligences," created by ObEN Inc., are being touted as the world's first AI hosts. Rather than simply being computer generated avatars, AI technologies including machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and speech synthesis have been used to "rebuild" the virtual copies of the celebrities from the ground up. I spoke to ObEN CEO Nikhil Jain, who told me that while the TV event will showcase his company's technology to the largest TV audience in the world, the potential of personal AIs – PAIs – goes further still, and could revolutionize many areas of society. In fact, the company is already working to create AI-powered doctors, nurses, and teacher, as well as its highly publicized virtual celebrities.