Journalist Creates Interactive AI Avatar of Herself

TechCrunch journalist Dominique Matthe built an interactive digital avatar of herself using Synthesia, a $4 billion AI avatar startup. The avatar was trained on one of her articles and can answer questions about it, marking the first time Synthesia created such an avatar for a journalist. The process involved a mini film studio session capturing photos and a two-minute voice recording. The avatar uses a combination of voice-to-text, video, language, and text-to-voice models. While friends found it creepy but impressive, the avatar is deterministic, only responding to questions about the specific article it was trained on.