Soul Zhang Lu’s AI Vision for Next-Gen Social Networking

At the recently held World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC 2024), the CEO of Soul, Zhang Lu got her team to show eventgoers how “AIGC + Social” is an effective strategy to use groundbreaking technology for improving interaction scenarios on social platforms.

Early Integration of AI in Social Media

But, Soul’s tryst with AI is certainly not a recent thing. Even when the app was still a newbie on the social networking scene back in 2016, Soul Zhang Lu was keenly focused on using artificial intelligence to power platform features. The aim was not just to make it easier for users to enjoy the applications that the platform had to offer but also to facilitate multimodal human-computer interaction.

Pioneering AI-Powered Features

In fact, Soul Zhang Lu’s company was among the first few to actively use artificial intelligence technology in the social media sector. For instance, Soul users would be offered their first taste of how artificial intelligence could be used to match like-minded people as soon as they would start using the app. 

When users joined the social platform, they were required to take the Soul test. The responses to the five questions that formed the test would be fed to an AI algorithm that used the information to understand the user’s inclinations, interests, and personality. 

Based on this analysis, the program would then recommend content and also match users with like-minded folks on the platform. While this process was impressive enough already, the team of Soul Zhang Lu could further hone its accuracy once they introduced the internally developed Lingxi recommendation engine.

Cutting-Edge Innovations at WAIC 2024

This was Soul Zhang Lu’s first stride towards stepping up in-house technology that would help to bring about significant enhancements in the features of the platform. At WAIC 2024, Soul presented three new features, namely “Digital Twin”, “Werewolf Awakening”, and “EchoVerse”, which constitutes Soul’s latest practice in exploring the profound integration of “AIGC + Social”.

Christened as “Digital Twin”, the new application which has the full power of Soul Zhang Lu’s AI toolkit backing it, taps into user responses, posted content, and conversations to create a blueprint of the user’s personality.“Digital twin” is actually able to provide prompts for initiating conversations and continuing interactions based on the personality type of the user.

The company boasts an array of impressive AI-powered capabilities such as intelligent dialogue, voice generation, image and music generation, voice animation, conditionally controlled content generation, prompt-driven content creation, intuitive context comprehension, multimodal input understanding, and more. 

Introduction of SoulX

In 2023, Soul Zhang Lu’s team added another feather to its cap with the introduction of SoulX, a large language model that was once again developed in-house. Close on the heels of this achievement came Soul’s voice generation large model. Together, these two cutting-edge AIGC technologies powered the other two applications introduced by Soul at WAIC, which included:

1. The AI-powered version of the game “Werewolf Awakening”. 
2. The stand-alone feature “Echoverse”.

The gaming scenario, Werewolf Awakening was already a big hit with the users of Soul App. And its popularity has soared to new heights since AI was made a part of the gaming package. The game now offers greater scope for entertainment and has become more immersive since the introduction of AI gamers. These AI characters are poles apart from regular gamebots that become predictable after a few rounds. 

In fact, these virtual gamers can strategize just like human players, better sometimes since they have access to the gameplay and outcomes of hundreds of players. And the more they play the better they get. The best part is that they are not always playing against human players. Users can just as well have these AI gamers on their team. Plus, when users are still learning the ropes, these virtual players offer just the right amount of handholding.

Werewolf Awakening

Undoubtedly, the AI players of Werewolf Awakening are impressed, but the team of Soul Zhang Lu hit the ball out of the park with “Echoverse”. This feature is different from anything else introduced on the platform thus far. Although, the app already had AI Goudan as a chat buddy, with Echoverse, the Soul team has raised the bar significantly.

Echoverse

While some amount of personalization was also possible with AI Goudan, Echoverse hands over the control completely to the users. It allows for the creation of a personalized virtual chat friend. Users can pick the visual imagery, the voice, the role, the personality, the communication style, and more.

In other words, these are tailor-made AI characters that are available to chat 24/7. So, this feature is sure to appeal to the young users of the app, who are grappling with loneliness and starved for meaningful, deep yet fun and entertaining chitchat.

Conclusion

By unveiling these three striking features and taking giant leaps toward building their AI- capabilities, Soul Zhang Lu and her team have made it clear that they intend to give their users what they crave.

A survey conducted by Soul arlier this year revealed that almost half of all respondents were keen on having an AI chat buddy. These features sure do cater to this burgeoning demand, and there are clear indications that there is a lot more from where these came.