D-ID has launched two new types of AI-powered avatars: Premium+ and Express. The company’s video-to-video avatar tools aim to provide personal look-alikes that can sub for their creators in uses ranging from instructional videos to business presentations, offloading on-camera duties in areas including sales, marketing and customer support. “Premium+ Avatars can generate hyper-realistic digital humans that are indistinguishable from real people and will serve as the foundation for fully interactive digital agents revolutionizing how brands communicate,” while Express Avatars can rapidly generate serviceable avatars “from just one minute of source footage.”

The two new avatar types are released in conjunction with D-ID’s AI Video Marketing Suite for Enterprise, which provides what D-ID describes as the capability to produce “personalized video campaigns with nothing more than source footage and a basic script.” (The screenshot below is taken from the video demo.)

Unburdening marketers from the “costly and complex” traditional techniques of capturing professional-quality video, D-ID says it provides “a transformative solution by significantly accelerating and scaling content output” and reducing the time involved while also lowering the expense.

The Premium+ Avatars are “highly customizable” and interactive, trained on a specific knowledge base of data so they can function as “digital spokespersons and engage with audiences in real-time verbal dialogue,” according to D-ID. They generate “personalized and thoughtful responses” that can potentially boost engagement and retention, the company explains in an announcement.

Premium+ “can reproduce an AI avatar for videos with hands and torso,” which the company feels will conjure a “more human-like in interaction” with users, TechCrunch points out, citing use-cases such as “creating sales leads, customer engagement and personalized marketing campaigns.”

“We think businesspeople would create a digital avatar of themselves,” D-ID CEO Gil Perry told TechCrunch, emphasizing “we want those avatars to be safe and built in a secure way so this tech is not used to mislead anyone.”

Business avatars are gaining buy-in from platforms. Zoom recently previewed its own approach, offering a “‘digital twin’ that can participate in meetings and calls.”

Globally, the market for digital avatars has already topped $18 billion across categories including gaming, education and marketing, according to Grand View Research, which says tech advancements like augmented and virtual reality, as well as AI, are allowing digital avatars to be increasingly interactive and lifelike.

“Avatars are now capable of closely mimicking human expressions and actions with remarkable accuracy,” Grand View wrote in the report Digital Avatars, Market Size and Trends.

ResearchAndMarkets.com also produced a report in conjunction with Synthesia, another mover in the B2B avatar space.

Related:
D-ID Employs AI to Translate Videos into Multiple Languages, ETCentric, 8/23/24
How AI-Generated Avatars Are Evolving into Brand Spokespeople, Ad Age, 11/1/24
95% of Workers Would Let Their AI Avatars Perform Tasks in Meetings, ZDNet, 10/16/24