Have you ever wished you could clone yourself? Imagine how much you could accomplish. The future of A.I. will make something kind of like that possible. By scanning your face and voice and observing how you talk and what you know, future A.I. could build a virtual assistant that's a virtual you. But one company is already working on it.

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.

ObEN Inc., a Pasadena-based artificial intelligence (AI) company, signed new entertainment partnerships and launched new celebrity-based Personal Artificial Intelligence avatars as part of its continued expansion into China's market. ObEN announced its official Chinese name roughly translating to "Celebrity Crew," in a nod to its growing presence in the country's entertainment industry, according to a Jan. 22 press statement. The new name also celebrates the Lunar New Year, when the company plans to release several new celebrity avatars created for the Chinese market. In December, ObEN collaborated with the Chinese music group SNH48 on the world's first human-PAI song and music video. Using its proprietary full-stack AI technology, ObEN created avatars for six of the group's most popular members.

A new generation of idols are singing and dancing in music videos in China, with plans to sell albums and perform in concerts where they will engage fans with personalised interaction. Only thing is, they don't actually exist, at least corporeally. In the latest Christmas music video released by Chinese girl idol group SNH48, six of the group's most popular stars sing and dance with some special partners – digital copies of themselves based on their looks, voices and body language. The four-minute music video, co-produced by Tencent-backed artificial intelligence (AI) start-up ObEN, claims to be the world's first commercially released song co-starring human singers and their AI 3D avatars. "This song is our first step to test the waters in the virtual idol market. We are planning to create more intelligent virtual idols, releasing albums and making movies for them," said Xiong Wei, vice-president of the Shanghai-based SNH48.

AI and Blockchain seem to be the new hammer -- making everything look like a nail, but are AI and Blockchain really necessary to solve most of the world's problems? What could AI do for Blockchain? AI LA's Third Thursday Talk Topic is Blockchain and we plan to get down and dirty discussing viable use cases and debunking all of the hype around two of the most overused buzzwords with some of the top minds working in both fields. Thank you to our amazing partners Phase Two, Semio.ai, LAtoken, and ObEN for helping us keep this event FREE!

The Project PAI Foundation is excited to announce the launch of the PAI Mainnet – its independent blockchain platform that allows users worldwide to create, own, and manage their own digital identity and data, allowing everyone to participate in a new globalized AI economy. This press release features multimedia. Project PAI's vision is to enable everyone in the world to create their own Personal AI (PAI), an intelligent digital avatar that looks, sounds, and behaves like them. The core technology for these intelligent avatars is powered by ObEN, a leading artificial intelligence company based in Los Angeles, CA. As an early adopter of Project PAI, ObEN uses blockchain to secure and authenticate the PAI's created by the users of its applications.

Pasadena-based artificial intelligence tech startup Oben is about to roll out its first product, PAI (Personal AI), a consumer app designed to let users create an AI-driven avatar with their own look and voice. Its underlying AI technology is already getting some select professional use. Overall, Oben's team believes AI can have a wide range of uses, such as in virtual and augmented reality, gaming, content creation and retail. With PAI, users essentially "teach" the app about themselves. "You take a selfie, and a visual avatar is ready in the app," Oben CEO and co-founder Nikhil Jain explained, adding that users can then customize their looks.

In September, Apple stunned the world when it flaunted its newfangled FaceID on its revolutionary iPhone X. But this geek tech is just the tip of the iceberg. An AI company has now upped the ante by making another version of you. California-based ObEN has created what one would call a "digital twin." The company's proprietary technology allows you to create and design a digital version of yourself by simulating your voice, face, and personality.

A Californian company has created software that uses photos to create 3D models of people for virtual environments. The avatars are the creation of Oben, a Pasadena startup firm that has been working since 2014 to create virtual identities for use online. The avatars are the creation of Oben, a Pasadena startup firm that has been working since 2014 to create virtual identities for use online. Creating an avatar (pictured) takes around eight hours to generate a head and shoulders replication from a photo and between two and twenty minutes of audio recordings.

California-based startup ObEN uses artificial intelligence to create a personalized and realistic 3D virtual self with just one smartphone image, and transports your virtual self into any AR and VR environment. ObEN, who was also chosen as one of 33 companies to participate in HTC's VIVE X accelerator program, raised nearly $8 million for their software that would historically take expensive hardware, and hours in a professional studio. "You can just take a quick selfie and a small sample of your voice and we combine it for you," obEN CEO and co-founder Nikhil R. Jain explained. "It makes a very personalized avatar which is speaking in your voice and moving like you. Once we have your voiceprint we can actually create new content in your voice, which would be attached to your avatar. And it can be employed into different kinds of scenarios. So you could actually tell this avatar, 'Read a book to put my kids to sleep.' " Using CUDA and GPUs on the Amazon cloud to train their deep learning models, their technology is able to capture the tone and intonation of a user's voice based on just a little voice recording.