The AI-Powered Social World of Soul Zhang Lu – A Trailblazing Journey

Soul App, a social platform that enjoys exceptional popularity among China’s Zoomers has been a pioneer in optimally combining AIGC with social. Under the leadership of the CEO and founder of Soul, Zhang Lu the team behind the app has consistently used new-age technologies to enhance interaction opportunities and the scope for interest-based connections on the platform.

Soul Zhang Lu and her team jumped onto the AI bandwagon way back in 2016 when the platform was still new. And impressively in a mere few years, they had cultivated their AI strength to the point where they already had an independently developed intelligent recommendation engine known as LingXi which could offer intuitive user match recommendations based on the posts and interactions of the user. 

After LingXi came the NAWA engine, which allowed users to create personalized avatars for their profiles. This was followed by significant RnD work on AIGC technology that gave Soul Zhang Lu’s team the ability to add impressive features to the platform’s various interaction scenarios. 

For instance, by 2020, Soul had the technological means for intelligent image and dialogue generation in response to user prompts, voice and music generation, contextual understanding of user inputs, voice animation, multimodal understanding as well as applications that were capable of intelligent, coherent and empathetic interactions.

The latest addition made by the team of Soul Zhang Lu to this growing list of AI capabilities was a voice generation large model. Introduced in 2024, this voice generation large model which was developed in-house has in its folds an intelligent dialogue large model, a voice recognition large model, a speech generation large model, and a music generation large model.

Together, these are capable of offering an application impressive capabilities such as voice DIY, generation of real timbre, switching to accept input and for output, and realistic, coherent, intelligent, and emotional dialogue in real-time that can mimic interactions with an actual person.

Along with Soul X which is the large language model introduced by the team of Soul Zhang Lu in 2023, this large voice generation model has infused the power of artificial intelligence in several features of the platform. So, it came as no surprise when the social app introduced not one, not two but three impressive AI-powered applications at the recently concluded World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC 2024).

At WAIC 2024, Soul presented its booth under the theme of “Human Touch, Digital Heart” and particularly demonstrated three new features, namely “Digital Twin”, “Werewolf Awakening”, and “EchoVerse”, which constitutes Soul’s latest practice in exploring the profound integration of “AIGC + Social”.

Digital Twin is capable of multimodal comprehension, so it the user’s posts and chats to gain an understanding of an individual’s communication style, preferred topics of conversation and overall persona. 

In fact, Digital Twin is designed to assist in most aspects of interaction, from giving the user an option of suitable responses to offering conversation openers and icebreakers. Simply put, Digital Twin is an intelligent communication assistant that helps the user to make friends on Soul and develop in-depth relationships.

The team of Soul Zhang Lu also debuted the AI version of “Werewolf Awakening” at WAIC 2024. The game which involves identifying and taking out werewolves was exciting enough already and has held on to its position as one of the most popular applications on the social platform. But with the inclusion of AI, its traction among the young users of Soul Zhang Lu’s app is expected to soar to new heights.

AI – players are now a part of Werewolf Awakening and human players can team up with them to fight the werewolves in the storyline or compete with these virtual gamers. Because these AI- players can think, strategize, and play just like their human counterparts, playing with and against them is just as exhilarating as playing with the other users on the platform with one crucial difference – these AI players are available around the clock.   

The best part is that these virtual gamers are also skilled communicators, so whether it’s a chat where all the players in a team create a strategy to hunt down werewolves or a quick explanation of how the game works, these AI players can do it all and more. Plus, their gaming skills are second to none, which means that playing against or with these AI gamers is like collaborating with or competing against the most skilled players on the platform.

Soul Zhang Lu also got her team to introduce a third feature at the WAIC. It’s called Echoverse and it allows users to create unique AI characters that are capable of human like chat. The user is in complete control when it comes to the creation of these personalized virtual chatters.

The user picks the visual image of the virtual chatter, the communication style, the voice, and even the role if any that the virtual character has to play. All along a sophisticated AI algorithm works in the background to help the user create the virtual person and once the persona is generated, AI continues to learn as the user interacts with this virtual character.

Soul Zhang Lu’s team gave eventgoers a taste of what the virtual persons of Echoverse could do and everybody who indulged in chat sessions with these AI-generated characters was left stunned at the emotiveness, the coherence, and the contextual depth of the interaction. These virtual persons also had human-like voices and could speak as congenially as a regular person. In a nutshell, those who tried out the feature unanimously agreed that chatting with the virtual characters of Echoverse felt as real and as natural as interacting with an actual person.

All three of these features are a prime example of how an emerging technology can be combined with social to offer something unique, something that has never been tried before. And Soul’s advantage is that it primarily caters to Zoomers, and this young user base is both comfortable with and keen on trying out new technologies. 

In other words, Soul Zhang Lu’s team has a receptive audience that is only too willing to offer immediate feedback on the platform’s upgraded and new features. This feedback then gets used to gauge the needs of the users and to work on existing and new applications. So, it’s no wonder that at this time, Soul has a comfortable lead over its competitors in China.