In a stark white browser tab, Sam -- a young blonde woman with perfectly shaped lips -- asks me for the solution to 2 2. I immediately think of the infamous Star Trek: The Next Generation episode in which a tortured Captain Picard is shown four lights. If he admits there are five lights, the ordeal will stop. I'm at home, staring at the future face of the metaverse and trying valiantly not to think about memes from a TV show known for its exploration of ethics and humanity. Sam isn't a real person -- she's a digital human created by Auckland-based tech company Soul Machines. Designed to have a short conversation with visitors about herself, she runs on a proprietary "digital brain" and studies my expressions via webcam.

The San Francisco-based company debuted a digital brand studio this week that lets clients customize their own digital person by choosing from a set of realistic CGI avatars and uploading conversational trees with natural language processing systems from Google or IBM. Founded by Academy Award-winning visual effects engineer Mark Sagar and entrepreneur Greg Cross at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Soul Machines is part of a small but growing scene of startups exploring how life-like human avatars can be put to use in business contexts, whether as virtual influencers, extensions of celebrity personalities or for interpersonal interaction practice. "The objective here is not to replace people, it's to really focus on things that are very, very difficult for organizations to deliver, like infinitely scalable customer interactions or infinitely scalable customer support at a completely different level of economics," Cross said. The company has raised $47.5 million to date from investors including Hong Kong-based Horizon Ventures and Salesforce's venture capital arm. It has already worked with a select set of clients on customer support avatars, including a digital customer service rep for Air New Zealand named Sophie, a car salesperson named Sarah for Mercedes-Benz and a virtual financial advisor named Jamie for Australia and New Zealand Banking Group.