Editorial
The Gist
- Transforming media creation. Synthetic reality improves content creation by allowing businesses to generate tailored marketing messages and enhance customer engagement through AI-driven avatars.
- Empowering workforce training. This technology improves employee training by simulating real-life scenarios and providing 24/7 access to educational resources.
- Inspiring innovation and trust. Responsible use of synthetic reality emphasizes the importance of verifying authenticity to maintain trust among stakeholders.
The surge in AI has accelerated the development and deployment of synthetic reality. In just the past year, we've witnessed an incredible amount of progress, including new academic studies and innovative tools, as well as companies — from emerging startups to established tech giants — rolling out new capabilities in this emerging field.
What once seemed like a vision of the future is now prompting a significant change in media creation and business communication. And this is likely just the beginning. As AI becomes intrinsic to business operations, we expect to see even more tools become available to create synthetic reality media and experiences.
What Is Synthetic Reality?
Unlike augmented or virtual reality that requires people to use display devices to enhance the real world or create artificial ones, synthetic reality can create a digital twin of a real person. What’s even more impressive is that in some cases, this can be done with just a few minutes of webcam video as a baseline.
Using nothing more than a text input, avatars can speak in nearly any language, use different accents or emulate our speech patterns and inflections. They can also convey human-like emotions, answer questions and engage in livestreaming discussions thanks to generative AI, large language models and natural language processing.
But this new advancement also raises new risks, which is why it’s very important to make sure you are using it in a responsible way. Before creating a digital twin of a person, it’s important to not only receive their permission but also understand what level of privacy they require and in what ways they are okay with their digital twin being used.
Related Article: How Generative AI Improves Customer Experience Metrics
Putting Synthetic Reality to Work for Your Organization
Synthetic reality has the potential to reshape our workforce by enhancing training, improving collaboration, increasing productivity and fostering innovation. Using this emerging technology responsibly could lead to fresh perspectives of what an enterprise can accomplish while still prioritizing and maintaining important human connections.
Synthetic reality’s superpower lies in its ability to create tailored, audience-specific content in a more cost-effective and time-efficient manner without compromising on quality. Here are a few promising use cases:
- It could aid in content creation by crafting tailored marketing messages, hosting virtual events and interacting with customers in real time. This helps create a seamless brand experience.
- It could create localized and multilingual communication to engage a diverse, global audience and eliminate language barriers.
- It could enhance employee training and onboarding with a scalable solution for educating new hires. This can simulate real-life scenarios, provide instant feedback and remain accessible 24/7 to enhance the learning experience.
- It could reshape internal communications by hosting internal meetings and delivering company updates, therefore cutting down on repetitive presentations by senior leaders while giving employees the human interaction and leadership access they seek.
For companies looking to experiment with synthetic reality, here are some steps you can consider to get started on your journey:
- Determine your goals for using synthetic reality. Are you looking to enhance customer experience across cultures, improve training programs to connect better with your workforce or develop completely new products?
- Continuously conduct market research to understand current trends and how competitors are using synthetic reality, as this technology is moving fast.
- Create a detailed plan outlining how synthetic reality can be implemented. This includes allocating budget, finding funding, assembling the right teams and choosing the appropriate technology hardware and AI software.
- Start with a pilot launch to a small, controlled audience. From there, you can monitor performance and gather extensive feedback to better the experience. Based on insights from the pilot, companies can make necessary adjustments and prepare for a full-scale launch.
Trust and Ethical Considerations
Like with any emerging technology, it’s critical to understand the potential risks and earn stakeholder and customer trust. How synthetic reality differs from its predecessors is that anyone with internet access and the right software can create media that looks real. This is why verifying the output is so incredibly important. Here are some ways to accomplish this:
- Create well-defined policies and guidelines for the appropriate use of synthetic media.
- Tap into the power of watermarks to embed identifiers.
- Implement systems that leverage AI and other technologies to automatically verify authenticity prior to publication.
- Organize training sessions to educate employees on identifying synthetic media and understanding its impact.
Related Article: Safeguard Generative AI to Protect Customer Privacy
Embracing the Potential of Synthetic Reality
Synthetic reality goes beyond being merely another entry in the expanding roster of AI-driven advancements. Its influence is expected to be extensive, characterized by its capacity to significantly change media and its potential to challenge trust.
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If I can leave you with one piece of advice, it’s this: As we dive into this new world, keep humanity front and center. Synthetic reality is about harnessing technology to enhance our work and deepen our relationships. It's about unlocking capacity to optimize our time and energy. It holds so much promise, but only if we place human values at the core of its development and use it responsibly.
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