Liu Qiangdong's digital human live broadcast warmed up the 618 promotion, revealing the technology and ruthlessness behind it

"A penny of hawthorn sticks on the link!" "Jingdong Supermarket is cheap, brush it up for Dongge!" "At 6:18 p.m. on April 16, in the live broadcast room of Jingdong Supermarket, Liu Qiangdong's digital human live broadcast debut started as scheduled. The live broadcast lasted nearly an hour that night, and the number of views quickly exceeded 20 million. During the live broadcast, Liu Qiangdong's iconic Suqian accent and fast speech speed were accurately restored, interspersed with subtle movements such as rubbing his fingers and nodding his head from time to time in daily speech, and adjusting his sitting posture from time to time in different scenes, occasionally pausing to think, making netizens call it difficult to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and the live broadcast effect was full.

In the era of AI e-commerce, this live broadcast is also a technology show of JD.com. Liu Qiangdong's "clone" is Jingdong Yanxi AI digital human. According to the JD Yanxi team, the "Procurement and Sales Dongge" AI digital human is a high-fidelity and large-profile digital human produced by JD Yunyanxi, which is trained through small sample materials, including audio and video materials for speeches and daily conversations.

In addition, the reporter from Nandu learned that Jingdong Yanxi is training a group of digital people from Jingdong procurement and marketing, and they will follow Dongge to appear in different Jingdong procurement and marketing live broadcast rooms.

"Liu Qiangdong" live broadcast brings goods to Jingdong Yanxi AI digital human

The founder's live broadcast is destined to have a more important intention than selling goods. Liu Qiangdong, who has lived behind the scenes for a long time, walked into the live broadcast room of JD.com as an AI digital person, and under the effect of the big guy, it is an excellent moment to show his own technology to the outside world.

Since the outbreak of the large model last year, e-commerce bigwigs have adjusted their strategies and bet on technology, believing that the huge changes in technology are enough to bring subversive changes to the Internet industry, and it is the consensus of the e-commerce industry to achieve new development with the help of AI in the era of stock competition.

Specific to the e-commerce live broadcast war, it is more cost-effective, and the AI digital human with 24-hour live broadcast is also the focus of the competition. AI digital humans, also known as virtual hosts or intelligent avatars, are digital avatars created through artificial intelligence technology. They are able to interact with users in real time and provide a variety of services, which has become the highlight of e-commerce live streaming.

In this live broadcast, Liu Qiangdong's digital person not only has a highly consistent accent, but also specific to different scenes, and subtle actions such as rubbing hands, adjusting sitting posture, turning his head to check and replying to comments are real and shorten the distance with netizens.

The reporter from Nandu learned that the live broadcast debut of "Purchasing and Selling Dongge AI Digital Human" used the AI-driven large-profile digital human self-developed in JD Yunyanxi, which is also the industry's first live broadcast form of entrepreneur digital human. According to the product manager of JD Yan Digital Human, the JD Cloud Yanxi team uses deep learning's mouth shape and facial animation generation algorithm to allow the large model to automatically learn the rules and skills for training mouth shape and facial expression generation from the training set. Through the end-to-end convolutional network, the offset of the vertex position corresponding to the change of expression is directly inferred from the input audio, so that the final generated action effect is more realistic.

The product manager also mentioned that "while matching actions according to semantics, interspersed with some small actions will bring users a sense of intimacy with real people", such as the AI digital human who buys and sells Dongge will also adjust his sitting posture from time to time and occasionally pause to think during the live broadcast.

In the future, there will be more digital people "on duty" for JD.com's procurement and sales

With the development of artificial intelligence technology, AI digital human technology is becoming more and more mature. In e-commerce live streaming, AI digital humans can make personalized recommendations and services according to users' interests and needs, improving the user's shopping experience. It is worth noting that AI digital human anchors are also highly customizable, and can be personalized according to brand image and marketing strategies, bringing more exposure and sales opportunities to brands.

Most of the bigwigs have a distinctive style that is familiar to the public. Liu Qiangdong has always been concise and to the point, emphasizing that Jingdong will return to the low-price strategy, and has been on the hot search many times. How to turn the big guy into an anchor who retains his own style? Nandu reporters learned that it is a big challenge for digital people to acquire the skills of "language refinement and direct to the point". The Jingdong Yanxi digital human team screened Liu Qiangdong's previous books and public speaking materials and fed them to the large model, which was able to capture and replicate the speaker's emotions and finely control the voice style, so that the synthesized voice was not only similar to the original voice in timbre, but also consistent in emotional expression, including the nuances of accent and rhythm, the speed of speech, and the modulation of intonation.

It is understood that there are more than 70 public image databases, more than 50 large-posture images, and more than 40 timbres. Nandu reporter learned that Jingdong Yunyanxi is secretly training a group of digital people in Jingdong procurement and marketing, and they will follow Dongge to appear in different Jingdong procurement and marketing live broadcast rooms.

Increase the content ecology JD warms up 618 in advance

The founder's digital human live broadcast not only showed off the technology, but also warmed up in advance for the 618 promotion that will come in two months. Nandu reporters noticed that in the live broadcast room, "explosive products started on June 18", "618 yuan Jingdong supermarket card was sent by lottery", "10 billion agricultural subsidies and explosive models dropped directly", etc., and they were strongly linked with the 618 promotion in the details.

More than a year after the traditional e-commerce platform adjusted its strategic direction, this year's 618 is going to roll up again. Last year's Double 11, Li Jiaqi, the hard-headed anchor of JD.com's procurement and sales, went out of the circle, and simply launched the "Jingdong Procurement and Sales Live Room", which quickly became popular with "no commission, no routine, no pit fee", which became a highlight during the big promotion period, and also found a new growth point for JD.com. Since then, JD procurement and sales have become another big IP after JD Logistics.

During this year's Hunan Satellite TV Mango New Year's Eve party, the number of viewers in the Jingdong live broadcast room exceeded 100 million within 5 hours, and the order volume was nearly 400,000. However, under the circumstance that the sales growth rate of major live broadcast e-commerce companies on Double 11 far exceeds that of traditional e-commerce, JD.com has increased its content ecology while developing live broadcasts, incubating its own head talents, and preparing for 618 in two months.

Recently, JD.com announced that it will invest 1 billion yuan in cash and 1 billion yuan in traffic as rewards to attract more original creators and high-quality content institutions to move in, and increase the layout of short videos. At the same time, JD.com subsidizes talents in more than 20 creative fields such as 3C digital, home appliances, mother and child, pets, fashion, and sports. At present, JD.com is actively preparing for the incubation of top talents, and plans to select the top 100 talents at the end of the year.

Jingdong wants to incubate the head talent, and netizens shouted Liu Qiangdong for the first time. Subsequently, relevant people from Jingdong released the news that Liu Qiangdong's live broadcast was preparing and would appear in a new form. On April 16th, JD.com officially announced the first big move to increase the content ecology, and Liu Qiangdong will "become" an AI digital person live on JD.com. It is foreseeable that after traditional e-commerce increases live broadcasts, 618 will roll up again this year.

Written by: Nandu reporter Huang Pei