Hong Kong start-up Pantheon Lab is building digital human avatars for clients in the city amid generative AI boom
- The start-up is working with, and looking to take on, more enterprise clients in Hong Kong including banks, restaurant chains and beauty products
- Pantheon Lab uses its own face shifting and lip syncing technology to make the digital human avatars look as realistic as possible
Pantheon Lab, a Hong Kong-based artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, is betting that AI-generated digital human avatars could prove useful in a range of traditional industries in the city and beyond, as public interest in advanced AI services such as ChatGPT continues to ramp up.
The company, founded in 2019, has been developing AI technologies that allow them to generate realistic digital human avatars, which it hopes will be used widely by businesses as virtual brand ambassadors or customer support assistants, among other things.
While AI-generated digital humans were still an unfamiliar idea to most people when they started the company in 2019, the pandemic encouraged many businesses to digitalise, and interest in the technology has picked up over the past year, according to co-founder and CEO Ivan Lau.
“Previously everyone thought AI is far away. Like there’s a lot of cool stuff, but it doesn’t affect me,” Lau said in an interview with the Post last week. “But this year it’s different.”
In 2022 Pantheon Lab created digital human ambassadors for Huawei Technologies Co for a Hong Kong marketing campaign to promote the tech giant’s laptops and smartphones. In late 2021, it produced a virtual ambassador for the Hong Kong-based meme-sharing website 9GAG.
The start-up is now working with, and looking to take on, more enterprise clients in Hong Kong including banks, restaurant chains and beauty products, Lau said, adding that they are not ready to disclose any company names yet.