Bringing humanity to technology: the rise of digital humans

The other day I visited a major media company known for its popular lifestyle magazines. Although I arrived at a staffed reception at the main entrance, I did not speak to anyone, because the registration process was done by myself on a tablet. Minutes later – after waiting in a chair – my host came to meet me.

The digital check-in solution did the job, but the company missed an opportunity to create a lasting, relational, or even emotional impact on me. Effective but cold and de-humanizing. These impersonal digital solutions will eventually loose ground to warmer, more humanizing, conversational and relation-building solutions. This is where digital humans come into play.

Overcoming isolation in modern technology

To me, it is about more than business optimization. The negative societal side effects of heavy digitalization are becoming more and more evident, with feelings of alienation and distancing growing alongside the expansion of digital platforms.

Some user experiences even lead to isolation due to impersonal interfaces or lack of human interaction. Many users find standard digital experiences lacking in warmth, which creates a sense of disconnect. For people who struggle with traditional digital interfaces – like those with visual impairments or limited technical skills – digitalization can be a barrier to completing simple tasks and forming connections with others. We need more human-friendly digitalization.

Changing the way we interact with AI

Conversational technology, particularly advancements in emotionally aware AI, seeks to bridge the gap by creating more natural, human-centered interactions. These developments make digital experiences feel more personal and empathetic. Digital avatars and virtual assistants are designed to simulate human interactions and add an emotional dimension to digital experiences. They put a face on technology.

Emotionally intelligent AI can recognize tone and mood, enabling systems to respond with empathy – an especially valuable feature in customer service and personal care settings. Digital humans represent the most advanced form of conversational AI, combining spoken language and body language. You interact with a screen that displays an animated image of a human, which responds to your communication – just like a real person would do.

Seamless interaction with human-like design

Essentially, digital avatars are just a human-like front-end to a digital system. When well-designed and suited to their assigned task, the digital human creates value for the company deploying it and emotional connection for the users. Using an avatar to represent technology is effective for a wide range of functions. The human mind is attuned to and emotionally responsive to facial signals, which is why digital humans are powerful communicators.

Getting to the strong and intuitive dialogue between a human and a digital avatar is not given. You have to work methodically with synchronization between lip movement, speech and gestures. The training and evaluation is extremely important, as an improperly adjusted human-like interface can lead to negative emotions. Feelings of “weirdness”, “rudeness”, “indifference” can also be evoked when communicating with a digital human.

One of the problems related to LLM queries is latency. It can take 1 to 100 seconds for the digital human to come up with the LLM-answer, and this pause can seriously damage the dialogue, because humans loose faith in getting an answer.

Now what the digital human can do is to communicate something, which humans will interpret as relevant in the dialogue. We could call it latency smoke. She could say “uhm, I got the question”, or she could nod or turn her head. What we want is for the digital human to ensure that the user knows it’s thinking; pretty much like the three jumping dots in chat-dialogues telling you that an answer is on the way.

As you see, digital humans are with us, but they are no off-the-shelf products. Just as humans are new at jobs, so are digital humans. The AI models have to be trained and iterated. An important and challenging task is limiting the knowledge base of the digital humans to help guide it to what it does – and does not – know, as well as topics it shouldn’t address despite having the knowledge.

Exploring a new era of human-like technology

Just a few months ago, the concept of digital humans was not well-known. Today, we as vendors are receiving informed and relevant request for proposals from more customers eager to put digital humans on their payroll. Airports, international hotels, global conferences and sports events have already started using digital humans. They address a significant scalability problem: Once developed, digital humans can provide consistent, positive user experience around the clock, and can be replicated multiple times at a minimal additional cost. This makes digital humans a strong business case.

For example, the digital human at a reception desk will free the human receptionist to handle more complex problems. Unlike their human counterparts, the digital receptionist remains composed, cheerful, service oriented and agreeable – even after an interaction with their 3117th visitor of the day. This is relevant not only to major media companies.

We can expect to see human-like digital (inter-)faces at museums, hotels, train stations, airports, cinemas, shopping centers and many other places.  The driving force is the need to humanize our increasingly digital world. Perfecting the speech, facial expressions, and body language of digital humans remains a work in progress.