Is it cool to clone an AI to meet for yourself?

Author | Nervous

Source | HyperAI (ID: HyperAI)

As remote offices and classes take place all over the world, a foreign engineer ca n’t stand the daily video conference, so he uses AI technology to “clone” himself and go to meetings for him. And if this technology is used by students, then the consequences ...

The epidemic that swept the world has changed companies to remote offices, and major universities have also closed campuses and switched to online courses.

It has changed the way of working around the world, and also changed the way students attend classes, defend and even graduate.

However, due to the limitations of remote office and online courses, some people took the opportunity to come up with a variety of "open small" methods, such as the following two outstanding students:

Pretend class plan 1: Record a video of taking notes

Pretend lesson plan 2: Photographs instead of myself

However, these "little cleverness" are still slightly weaker than the high-level shifting method of an overseas engineer.

Clone your own AI and hold a meeting for me

Video conferencing is not suitable for everyone. Someone on Twitter is now living in the world of Zoom.

A company CEO tweeted and now lives in the world of Zoom every day

Microsoft Teams added 12 million users in just one week, from 32 million to 44 million (March 11 to March 18), and the duration of a single-day meeting exceeded 2.7 billion minutes.

Zoom is more than two months, the number of users has increased 20 times, reaching 200 million.

However, a foreign engineer Matt Reed has also published an article recently, saying that the Zoom conference cannot be tolerated.

Therefore, he opened his mind and built an AI-driven cloning project Zoombot, which can clone his own virtual image and participate in video conferences.

This avatar, using the latest AI speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion, instead of participating in a Zoom meeting, can not only display his own image, but also answer questions.

Let's take a look at the live scene of this "Clone Man" meeting:

Isn't this magical "hahahaha" funny?

At the beginning, it was difficult for everyone to find out that the Reed who appeared in the meeting window was a "cloner", but then he stumbled over the car instantly with his harsh words.

If the technology is improved a little bit, I am afraid it can really get through.

Photos, voice recognition library, virtual camera, get it!

According to Reed, this seemingly advanced "stand-in project" is not difficult to achieve. He also gave a tutorial intimately, published on GitHub:

https://github.com/mcreed/zoombot

He wrote that it turns out that cloning yourself is much simpler than cloning the brain in "Western World".

First, he opened Quicktime and executed File-> New Movie Recording, where he intercepted some of his own video images;

Reed intercepted images of himself smiling, speaking, thinking

Then, based on the Artyom.js open source library (a speech recognition JavaScript library), a simple Web application was built, which was expanded and developed so that you can understand and reply to some simple conversations, such as:

Human: "How are you?"

AI: "I'm fine, thank you for your greetings."

Human: "Do you understand?"

AI: "I can't hear your voice clearly."

Human: "Goodbye."

AI: "Let's talk to you later. Pay attention to safety."

After setting up a simple conversation like this, use a software called ManyCam, using the webapp as the source, to create a virtual camera, and set the Zoom webcam as a virtual camera.

So far, everything is ready, just turn on the speaker, start Zoombot, and then you can happily do what you like (mo) 欢 (yu).

According to reports, the Zoombot project only took about four hours to build, and Reed spent about four hours to conduct the Zoom meeting and record the colleagues' real reactions (the colleagues were not informed before the trial).

The author Reed reminded: "The trick to using avatars is to leave the meeting room before the chat, because once you enter the endless loop of" I can't hear clearly, can I repeat it again? ", That would be troublesome."

In addition, Reed also pointed out that one of the advantages of this project is that it does not need to give it a wake-up word like "Hey, Siri" before it can be used.

As long as the outside world has a voice trigger, it can respond, and then respond with the action of the face.

I have to say that this engineer is also very hard to touch the fish.

Don't want to go online? Clone one for you

Seeing this, a classmate couldn't help but think: This trick can be used in online classes! (Here manual wit.gif)

Many student parties have deep experience and have been caught in the fear of being dominated by online courses since the winter vacation. Because of the conflict with the online class, everyone also retaliated and collectively went to the major application stores to score a certain star.

But no matter how many stars you play, online courses are still available. In order to evade the online class, many students used 18 kinds of martial arts (you can review the previous picture). Some people even uploaded tips for online course skipping at Xiaobo.

Reminder: Non-professionals, please do not imitate

But now, with AI cloning technology, skipping net classes can also become very advanced.

According to the "cloning" guide provided by Reed, it only takes 7 steps to easily create a virtual self.

Replace the photos in the img folder in the Zoombot project;
Put all these files on the server running https: //, otherwise Chrome will cause a security error and cannot access your microphone;
Visit your Zoombot https: // URL in Chrome;
Use the button at the top left to open Zoombot and it will start listening to all these key phrases;
Using Chrome as the source, create a virtual webcam. (The author uses ManyCam to do this);
Set your Zoom camera to "ManyCam virtual webcam";
Turn on the speaker and let your Zoombot start working!

If you can prepare the knowledge question and answer data of this lesson before the class and give it to Zoombot, you do n’t have to worry about the teacher ’s sudden questions. Memorizing the text and spelling words may not be a problem.

And you can go to bed and play games ... So, do you want to try it?

However, having said that, it is up to me to take the exam in the end. It is better to devote all my time to concentrate on listening to the lesson.

Otherwise, the tears left by the exam will be the water for skipping classes ...

【END】