As a front-runner in China’s social networking sector, Soul App was invited to participate in the 2024 T-EDGE Innovation Conference and TMTPost Annual Financial Forum. The event sees the coming together of major players from the social and short video industries. This year, along with Soul, Inmyshow Universe, Giant Interactive and iFlytek were also a part of the event.
As a member of the roundtable discussion, themed “AI is Here: A New Paradigm of Global Youth Pop Culture”, the Vice President and Product Leader of Soul App, Che Bin, shared the latest AI developments and future outlook for the immensely popular social platform.
While talking about the impact of artificial intelligence on the social networking industry, Che Bin said that the rapid development of AI technology has ushered in a new wave of transformation in the social industry. Although this isn’t exclusive to the social networking industry, as Che Bin explained when used optimally, AI shows enormous potential in efficiency enhancements and emotional and multimodal applications.
Soul App has the distinction of being a pioneer in the social space in more ways than one, which explains the loyal fan following it enjoys among China’s youth, particularly Gen Z. Since its inception in 2016, the social networking platform has evolved from a matching system based on interest graphs into an app that fully integrates with users’ social lives.
He attributed this evolution to Soul’s core development strategy which has always revolved around better facilitating social interactions between people. In recent years, Soul’s engineers have made extensive use of AI to improve both the functional and emotional value of the platform’s many features, thus aligning their efforts with the core strategy.
One of the recent developments presented to Soul’s user base involved the use of AIGC technology to facilitate smooth human-machine interactions. The newly launched feature generated a lot of enthusiasm, reflecting a high level of acceptance of AI technology among younger generations and signaling their willingness to adopt a transformative shift in social interaction methods.
The easy acceptance of this feature may come across as worrisome at first glance. After all, most would surmise that the adoption of human-machine interactions could negatively impact social skills and human-human communications.
But, Che Bin was quick to quell these concerns by using critical insights into user behavior and key data points from Soul. He pointed out that contrary to assumptions the integration of AI has not reduced human-to-human communication. Instead, the ability to communicate with virtual humans has increased the frequency of interactions among young users and the data gathered by the researchers of Soul App confirmed this.
Explaining the phenomenon, Che Bin said that users have no problems distinguishing between interactions that involve virtual persons and real people. He also emphasized that human-machine interaction was never meant to be and will never be a substitute for human interaction.
However, it does work as an effective tool for social skills, akin to a simulation where users can practice everything from light-hearted and inconsequential chitchat to deeper, philosophical conversations and everything in between.
Che Bin clarified that when offering users the ability to communicate with virtual persons, Soul App’s engineers had a clear goal – Interactions were not meant to be mere technical exchanges, instead, they were supposed to have an emotional angle that not only helped in honing social abilities but also made the interaction feel fulfilling.
Talking about this further, Soul’s VP pointed out that humans are hardwired to love objects and this does not take away from their ability to love humans, rather it serves as a foundation for loving people.
He created a link between this and human-machine interactions by stating that communicating with virtual beings allows users to practice social skills in a stress-free environment, so in essence it works on a similar principle as a person’s ability to love things and people.
The fact is that a lot of people shun social gatherings and even recede into their shell not because they are averse to interacting with those around them. The shyness is often attributed to the fact that their social skills are lacking and they fear being judged based on this.
Interacting with virtual persons removes the concerns about being judged or even mocked. This can without a doubt help to enhance an individual’s ability to connect and communicate with others in real-life scenarios, positively impacting interpersonal relationships.
Che Bin further elaborated on Soul App’s AI strategy by explaining that this emotional core is not just a part of the platform’s virtual companions, instead it is a part of the overall AI innovation strategy of the company. He said -that for Soul “emotional intelligence” takes precedence over “intellectual intelligence” when it comes to developing artificial intelligence models.
So, all of Soul’s large-scale AI models are designed to emphasize emotional feedback, providing users with richer emotional experiences. This is a unique approach indeed as this emotion-centric development of AI not only addresses user needs but also offers a new direction for the social industry’s growth.
Having said that, this isn’t Soul App’s first attempt at using AI mindfully and tactically to enhance the emotional value of the platform’s features. Since its early years, the social networking app has leveraged up-and-coming technologies to offer Souls App’s predominantly Gen Z users a unique experience.
Hence, developing in-house technical capabilities has played an integral role in Soul’s journey in AI. It all started with LingXi, a self-developed engine that allowed for intuitive matching of users and content. This was followed by Soul X, a proprietary large language model that seamlessly embedded AI capabilities across use cases on Soul, which epitomizes the company’s product philosophy of the “Synergic Model-application Interplay”.
In 2024, Soul App upgraded its AI model capabilities to a multimodal, end-to-end large-scale model. This upgrade supports text-based conversations, voice calls, multilingual capabilities, multimodal comprehension, and realistic virtual human interaction. Simply put, the people at Soul have a clear vision of integrating AI into social contexts to enable richer, more emotionally intelligent interactions.
This transformative journey undertaken by Soul App has the potential to redefine social platforms. But this is just one aspect of it! This one-of-its-kind approach also paves the way for the broader application of AI in enhancing human connection. And that was the goal all along as was clarified by Che Bin. In conclusion, he expressed hope that Soul could collaborate with industry peers to shape the future and drive deeper integration of AI technology within the social domain.
