BeingAI Has Unveiled a Human-Like AI

The future is closer than you think.

And, BeingAI is bringing beings with the artificial intelligence needed to become an immersive feature of everyday reality, the first of which is a virtual character named "Zbee," according to a new page on its official website.

So get ready, because a new virtual being has been born.

BeingAI's AI entity is designed to reflect 'positive values'

The new entity, Zbee, can operate on different platforms, interacting with people whenever they want, wherever they want, and provide a gamified version of human interaction throughout digital interfaces. Designed to offer an engaging personality along with personal stories, the entity will entertain, befriend, and even mentor humans, according to an initial report from Venture Beat. Based in Hong Kong, BeingAI is the collaborative project of founders Lee Chapman and Jeanne Lim, the president and CEO of the company, respectively, in addition to the CTO Amit Kumar Pandey. Zbee can interact with people in real-time of its own initiative, throughout multiple media platforms and devices, to immerse users in a narrative process. But it looks like Zbee will redirect interaction into positive behavior, which cynicism about objectively bad states of affairs may not necessarily go anywhere meaningful.

On a general note, BeingAI wants AI entities to engage, inspire, and support an entire generation of young users, who are open to instruction from a non-human, while also offering valuable data that the entity can leverage for its knowledge basis. Lim wants Zbee to serve as a model for transmedia storytelling (that is, narrative experiences across multiple platforms), so people may feel like they've organically melded with personal spaces while interacting with something that, strictly speaking, is synthetic. To this end, Zbee was designed to reflect, functional, positive values, and emulate the experience of empathy.

BeingAI's 'Zbee' AI can interact with humans via augmented reality

And, BeingAI is showing off Zbee at a Las Vegas licensing expo, to engage in talks with potential partners (other 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," added Lim, in the Venture Beat report. Considering the sophistication and ambition of BeingAI's latest AI entity, it's a testament to the company that it didn't exist until the fall of 2020. Lim felt compelled to design new and innovative AI entities while working for David Hanson, founder of Hanson Robotics, where Lim worked as Chief Marketing Officer to follow the development of Sophia, the AI robot.

"He was working on creating conscious robots, or conscious AI," explained Lim in the report. "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." Sophia is a physical robot created by Hanson to emulate a human-like presence in an artificial entity. Taking her cue from Hanson's project, Lim envisaged the potential of an all-virtual AI that can leverage multiple platforms for real-time engagement. "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," said Lim. As of writing, BeingAI is developing its own AI and conversational software, which, among other things, can guide users through meditative practices, and even meet us via an AR interface, where the possibilities are virtually limitless.