A Glimpse Into the Future with Interactive Avatars

When I first heard about HeyGen's interactive avatars, I got pretty excited. You see, I had already been thinking about how cool it would be to be able to create? some AI software that would allow me to set up a virtual mastermind with some of the brightest humans as if they were actually there. Imagine getting on a zoom call and being able to ask questions of Albert Einstien, Alan Turing, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk as if they were your colleagues wanting to help you solve various business issues. You would see real videos of these people as they responded to you and each other, and listen in their own voices, yet none of the responses would be canned. It would all be AI.

Well, HeyGen recently released "interactive avatars" and I thought we would be able to do this. Sadly, we are not there yet. But with what they have done, I'm guessing we might be able to do this within a year.

Here is how it works. From the HeyGen app, you click on "Labs" at the bottom of the left menu, then you click on "Interactive Avatar" from the main screen. On the next screen, there is a button in the upper right that says "New Avatar." Even though HeyGen touts the interactive avatars as being free, it is only free to use one of their 5 template avatars. If you want to create a new custom Avatar, you must pay a minimum of $699 per month. Creating multiple interactive avatars (like Einstien, Turing, Jobs, Gates, etc) would requite a custom quote from HeyGen, and even then, you would not be able to do this (at least not yet). Let me explain.

Let's start by playing with one of the template avatars. Each of these has been trained to accomplish something specific. For example, Sofia, the Business Coach, wants you to ask her questions about how she can help you with your business. She cannot act as a pier, willing to take your advice, only to give advice. The same is true for each of the other template avatars - they are programmed to be the teacher, but not interact as a pier or a student. That makes masterminding with these interactive avatars a challenge or even impossible.

But, you can train your customer interactive avatars on a specific data set. So for example, if you were creating an avatar of Alan Turing, you would be able to feed it all the information about the Turing Test and the Enigma machine, so that he would know what Alan Turing knew, and would be able to respond accordingly. That is cool as you could do this for each avatar that you wanted to have in your mastermind.

However, the other issue that HeyGen has right now is that only one interactive avatar can be in a zoom meeting at a time. Even if you had separate accounts for Turing, Jobs, Musk, etc., only one avatar would be able to be in your zoom meeting at one time. So again, the idea of creating a mastermind that included a bunch of super-intellects and letting them interact with each other is not currently feasible (but it would be so cool to have Sam Altman asking questions of Alan Turing - I'd love to see that!). This also means that ... CONTINUE READING ...

Masters of Mayhem: A Virtual Think Tank Gone Awry

Dr. Nathan Hargrove had always been ahead of his time. The leading expert in artificial intelligence, he'd spent the better part of the last decade designing neural networks that mimicked the cognitive processes of history's greatest minds. When HeyGen launched its interactive avatars, Nathan saw an opportunity. Sure, their tech wasn't quite there yet, but he had the skills and resources to tweak it.

With a few clandestine hacks and a server farm in his garage, Nathan succeeded where HeyGen had fallen short: he created an interactive mastermind group featuring Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk. He even threw in Marie Curie and Nikola Tesla for good measure.

The group was programmed to interact with one another dynamically, learning and adapting with each session. And tonight, Nathan planned to test it live... by accidentally inviting them to a company-wide Zoom meeting.

Scene 1: The Launch

Nathan adjusted his glasses and leaned into his microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future."

A chorus of bored mumbles greeted him from the other Zoom participants—his colleagues at IntegroTech, where he was supposed to be presenting quarterly projections. Instead, Nathan hit a few keys, and his custom avatars began ... CONTINUE READING ...