Since 2016, the CEO of Soul, Zhang Lu has implemented artificial intelligence to improve existing platform features and even to introduce new applications. This early adoption of this new-world technology has helped Soul not only to gain significant traction amongst its young users but also to continue holding its position as one of the most popular social platforms among China’s Zoomers.
Within the first few years of the platform’s inception, the team of Soul Zhang Lu had already introduced “Lingxi”, an indigenously developed intelligent recommendation engine that continues to play a crucial role in the platform’s content recommendation and user matching systems. Lingxi taps into user responses to analyze their interests and inclinations and matches them with other like-minded users.
Content is also recommended based on this analysis. Furthermore, Soul Zhang Lu’s platform uses a decentralized mechanism to ensure the distribution of content in such a way that posts get sent out only to those who are interested in the central theme or topic of the content while ensuring that all posts get equal exposure.
The NAWA engine, another example of Soul Zhang Lu’s commitment to supporting the AIGC + Social strategy, allows users to create distinct personalized avatars that are a reflection of their own style, attitude, and overall personality. Once again AI is on hand to help users to create notice-worthy avatars with a few simple clicks.
Because Soul Zhang Lu started along the AI path at the outset, by 2020, her team could take the platform’s AIGC capabilities to several notches above industry standards. For instance, within 4 years, the platform had garnered impressive AIGC capabilities such as intelligent dialogue, voice, and image generation, music creation, voice animation, and much more.
Three years later, the team debuted their very own large language model – Soul X which added more power to their AIGC tool bag with capabilities such as prompt-driven multimodal and contextual comprehension as well as conditionally controllable content generation. These allow various platform applications to offer notably humanlike congenial and emotional interactions.
The use of AIGC technology allowed the team of Soul Zhang Lu to unveil three striking functions at the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC). These AI-powered applications included “Digital Twin”,“Werewolf Awakening” and “Echoverse”.
Together these three embody all the efforts that Soul Zhang Lu and her team have put into the in-house development of AIGC technology. These features are designed in a way that allows for the effective integration of AI into the socialization experience of Soul App users.
These newly introduced AI-powered features are also Soul’s response to the willingness and enthusiasm that young users have for interacting with AI characters. In fact, these applications greatly improve interaction quality and efficiency and enhance the users’ socialization experience.
Of the three AI-powered features, Digital Twin is dedicated to assisting users in creating virtual digital humans for efficient socializing. Users can authorize the platform to set the characteristics of the digital twin based on their own chat records and posting content in Soul’s public domain scenes. The digital twin can achieve the effect of replicating a real person to the greatest extent. “Digital Twin” now has the ability to offer intelligent reply recommendations and even conversation starters, so it helps users to both start and continue socializing on the platform.
Since the platform’s inception, Soul Zhang Lu’s team has ensured that the App’s users have no dearth of diverse and entertaining options for interaction. For a while now, one of the most popular applications available on the platform has been the gaming scenario Werewolf Awakening. The new version of the game allows the full participation of AI characters in the gameplay. So, the virtual players are not just a part of the overall storyline built into the game but actual virtual players that users can team up with or against.
These AI players can communicate, strategize, and make decisions just like human players. In other words, Soul Zhang Lu and her team have now made it possible for users to indulge in an immersive and exciting session of Werewolf Awakening even when their friends are not online. Of course, these AI gamers still offer the basic functionality of explaining game rules and playing strategy to new users. But they do a better job of it because these AI players can help users learn the ropes by actually playing alongside them.
Simply put, Werewolf Awakening’s AI-players open up a new dimension for human-machine interaction. And these virtual gamers pass on the proverbial baton to the AI characters of “Echoverse”. The third AI-powered application introduced by the team of Soul Zhang Lu at the WAIC, “Echoverse” is a standalone feature that takes multimodal AI-human interaction to a whole new level.
Users can create their very own AI-characters, and personalize every aspect of the persona/personas thus created, including the visual image/avatar of the character, the voice traits, communication styles, and even the personality of this virtual human. In essence, Echoverse allows users to create their very own chat buddy.
What makes this feature exceptional is that the AI characters created by the users are incredibly human-like in their interactions. Plus, they are available for a quick chat or a long heart-to-heart session whenever the user feels like it. Also, because the persona is created by the user, rapport is an instant part of the interaction.
Thus far, Soul Zhang Lu’s focus has been on encouraging interest-based connections between the users of the platform. But with these three features, the platform has also turned into a hub for meaningful interactions and connections between humans and AI. And this is a convincing example of how Soul is pursuing its AIGC + Social strategy.
