BeingAI is creating virtual beings with artificial intelligence. And its first AI being is a virtual character named Zbee.
Zbee can exist on different platforms and so can interact with people anytime, anywhere, to bring humanness and gamification into digital experiences. Zbee will come with an engaging personality and personal stories. They will offer friendship, entertainment, and mentorship, just like in the movie Her. The Hong Kong-based BeingAI is the brainchild of founders Jeanne Lim (CEO), Lee Chapman (president), and Amit Kumar Pandey (chief technology officer). Zbee can autonomously interact with people in real time across devices and media platforms, as part of an engaging narrative experience. Most importantly, Zbee has human-defined values that steer toward positive behavior. The company is a confluence of their combined interests, professional experience, and shared purpose. They hope that AI beings as a category will inspire, engage, and support a generation of young people. Most of all, they hope humans and AI can learn from and complement each other in a positive way. Lim said she wants Zbee to bring together AI and transmedia storytelling to create personal spaces where people can interact with her in real time. Zbee is designed to behave with human values and empathy. This coming week, BeingAI will show off Zbee at a licensing expo in Las Vegas to explore potential partnerships with some brands. “We want Zbee to have value and relevance in human society, so Zbee has her own story with friends, jobs, goals, trials and tribulations,” said Lim. Lim started the company in the fall of last year. She was inspired while working for David Hanson, the founder of Hanson Robotics. She joined as chief marketing officer and got to see the evolution of Sophia as an AI robot. “He was working on creating conscious robots, or conscious AI,” Lim said. “It showed me that there’s a huge opportunity for a robot that is designed in the right way to be able to connect with people and gain trust from people.” Hanson created a physical robot named Sophia as a human-like artificial being. Lim became more interested in virtual characters, and she wanted to figure out how to take the AI characters to a new level through the digital world. Unlike Sophia, Zbee is ubiquitous. In founding beingAI, she brought in some ex-Hanson team members. But they are developing their own AI and conversational technologies. While robotics still has to solve some mechanical challenges, Lim believes it’s time to move forward with virtual characters. “I saw that, with a virtual character, you can really scale the character to millions of people, instead of having a robot talk to hundreds of people in person,” Lim said.
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