FAQ: Answering your most frequently asked questions about our digital humans

As any new technology starts to emerge into our minds, hearts and business innovation plans, you can be forgiven for having more questions than answers. Just look at the metaverse. You may not have heard the term a few months ago, and now it’s all anyone will talk about. Whether they’re answering your particular questions is another matter. See also blockchain circa 2017.

The year 2021 has seen digital human technologies jump briskly into the business lexicon, brand strategies and the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.

You probably have questions – these technologies are relatively new, after all. We’d like to answer some of them for you.

So, below, we’ve collated some of the most frequently asked questions we get about digital humans. A digital humans FAQ, if you will.

If you wish to learn the very basics beforehand, our digital human buyer's guide is free and available here – or check out the video below for a quick explainer.

Can we create a custom digital human?

Yes. While we offer a catalogue of “out of the box” digital humans, many brands choose the option to create their own custom digital human employee. If you want to embody your brand and be in full control of how your digital human looks, sounds and acts, this is the right option for you.

If you want to create your own digital human employee, you have two options:

Option 1. Embody your brand with a new digital human

Creating a custom digital human can involve workshopping their personality, how they look and what type of voice they have. It might also include personality traits that make them more human.

Our team can facilitate this process. We’ll then create your digital human based on this spec, eventuating in your own custom digital human who breathes your brand..

Or we can help if you've already started. For example, if you've created a digital human using Unreal MetaHuman Creator, we can add the final layer of polish to make it into a fully autonomous virtual being.

It can be one of the most exciting parts of the process, as your team starts to consider what your brand would look and sound like if it were a person. You can see a brief snapshot of this in the video below, in which we helped the team at health insurers Southern Cross create Aimee.

Option 2. “Clone” a real person

Digital “cloning” is a term fraught with potential misunderstanding. But what it essentially means is taking a real person and using photometry to capture their exact likeness – also sometimes called a digital double.

That person can be a rockstar founder or exec, an existing brand ambassador, an influencer or anyone else you choose. A photometry session captures their expressions and visual identity down to the very pore. We can facilitate this process, too.

Our team then designs your digital human using this extremely high-fidelity source material. You can see more of this process in the video below, where we created a digital version of Groov founder and former Rugby great Sir John Kirwan.

Can we connect our own NLP platform

Yes! In fact, if you use an NLP or chatbot platform (like IBM Watson, Amazon Lex, Microsoft Bot Framework or Dialogflow), you’re already well on your way to creating your first digital human. Any NLP or chatbot service can be integrated into our platform. This will drive the dialogue your digital human speaks.

You can also integrate your database, CRM or other knowledge base to make your digital human smarter, and able to communicate with your own live data. Or, we can use large language models like Open AI (ChatGPT, GPT-3, etc.) to make truly open-ended conversation, putting into place the guardrails and the personality to make this a viable solution.

The added benefit here is that customers can use your chatbot for fast, simple, text-based tasks. They can rely on your real people for in-depth and valuable human interactions. And your digital human can offer a channel in between, convenient and emotionally engaging. It’s often referred to as building a digital workforce – and there’s an eBook for that too!

If you need assistance connecting your NLP (or on any of the above) our team can help along the way.

Can digital humans speak multiple languages?

Si, oui, ja, sim, evet, tak, da, نعم, हां – YES!

One of the biggest benefits, we think, of digital human employees is their ability to be multilingual. They speak your language (or more specifically, your customers’ languages) to create a better, more emotionally engaging digital experience.

We believe today’s brands can benefit from being multilingual, and the stats show extensively why.

Which languages are available?

At the time of writing, UneeQ’s digital humans understand 74 languages and speak 43 languages. These include French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Dutch, German, Greek and many others.

Our platform also supports any language or dialect through custom TTS (text-to-speech) integration.

The number of languages we support natively in our platform is growing all the time, so we advise you to ask your UneeQ customer success rep for an up-to-date list of languages currently available

What are some common digital human use cases?

Digital humans excel when they provide a more emotional interface within a stage of the customer journey that’s hard to service with real people. Similarly, there are some tasks consumers don’t always feel comfortable consulting with a real person about – sensitive matters around personal finances or health, for example.

In its summary, Gartner notes some common ways digital humans are used today.

“Use cases abound for these humanoid technologies in HR training, communications, medical care and customer service,” Gartner writes. “COVID-19 has pushed the technology potential to enable no-touch experiences, combat social isolation and provide care to the elderly.”

Drilling down another level, we’ve found some of the more frequent use cases involve helping with online form applications, providing in-store or online product guidance, concierge services, patient triage, or health coaching – to name a few.

In reality, the most impactful moments in which a digital human can help are more numerous than we can write (or probably even imagine at the moment). If you have a great use case idea, we’d love to help make it a reality.

What engine do you use to drive the animations?

The proprietary UneeQ platform drives the facial and body animations of your digital human. Your digital human will automatically animate in a natural way as the conversation progresses.

Brands can easily take control over which emotional responses will trigger at certain points in a digital human interaction. This ensures that highly sensitive or even valuable moments in the interaction are guaranteed the right emotional response from a digital human.

Other technologies can create avatars – from synthetic media and deep fake technologies to Unreal’s impressive MetaHuman Creator. Our platform is different. It handles the humanlike interactivity of these digital humans, allowing them to converse with users at scale and express themselves in real time, like a real person does.

Have any other questions?

We’d love to answer them. We understand new technology in particular needs a hands-on approach, and our team can help you crystalize and realize your big ideas.

If we’ve not provided an answer to your specific question, you may be able to find it in our buyer's guide. In it, we walk you through a digital human project, timelines, and discuss how to assess if you even need a digital human – or might like to opt for one of the alternatives.

But if you have questions that you haven’t seen answered on our website, and you’d like to get your digital human project off the ground, lock in a consultation with one of our specialists. We’ll help you put your best digital foot forward.

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