AI unicorn unveils most ’emotionally expressive’ avatars on market [Video]

A British startup today unveiled new AI humans that blur the line between the virtual and the real. Synthesia calls the digital beings “Expressive Avatars.” They promise the most realistic emotional expressions on the market. 

Generated by an AI model that’s trained on footage of real actors, the avatars are built for video creation. Users simply enter a text prompt and the synthetic humans read them out on a screen.

The photorealistic renders are certainly impressive. But what makes them unique is their capacity to convey human feelings.

Using a technique called “automatic sentiment prediction,” Synthesia’s AI models infer the emotions within text. This determines the avatar’s tone of voice, body language, and facial expression.

“This is definitely the first iteration of avatars that can express emotions and understand the sentiment of the content,” said Victor Riparbe, Synthesia’s CEO and co-founder.

The avatars will also always generate entirely new and unique outputs. Feed them the same script twice and they will respond with two …