TikTok Announces Ad Suit Expansion with Stock Avatars and AI Dubbing Feature

TikTok is set to revolutionize its advertising by introducing AI-powered digital avatars that enable brands to create highly customizable promotional content.

Announced on June 17, this innovation is part of TikTok’s effort to extend its Symphony ad suite. It will now feature stock avatars and an improved AI dubbing function.

TikTok Expands AI Avatar Feature

The stock avatars in TikTok’s new ad tools are created from video footage of real actors and licensed for commercial use. Brands that wish to leverage this feature can choose from the pre-made avatars to fit their campaign needs.

Furthermore, the AI dubbing tool allows brands to select various voices and accents to read scripts, which are then dubbed onto the avatars. This feature supports ten languages and dialects, including English, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.

Interestingly, the AI system can translate the script and synchronize the avatars’ mouth movements to match the dubbed language. This function mainly creates a natural and engaging viewer experience.

In addition, the new tools include a text-to-speech function. By leveraging this function, users can dub over actors in multiple languages, making it appear that the avatars speak the chosen language. 

The AI can even generate scripts, which helps to streamline the content creation process for brands.

The Symphony ad suite also includes a virtual assistant that scans TikTok for trending content, generating ideas and scripts based on current trends. This ensures that brands can produce relevant, timely advertisements that resonate with the platform’s audience.

These AI avatars and the translation and dubbing features are in their beta phase. They’re only available to a limited number of users through a waitlist.

Furthermore, TikTok is also testing custom avatars that replicate the likeness of specific content creators and brand spokespeople. These custom avatars possess the same multi-language capabilities as the stock avatars.

Also, they offer brands even more personalized advertising options, which are being tested within the platform’s creator community.

Significantly, to ensure transparency, TikTok will automatically label videos created with the AI tools as AI-generated. In a demonstration video, this was shown as a small box in the bottom corner of the screen, indicating the use of AI in the content.

The AI Avatar Trend

Recently, TikTok has begun experimenting with these AI avatars. However, this isn’t a new trend in the tech world. For instance, in September, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, launched an AI chatbot initiative featuring avatars of well-known celebrities.

Meta created AI versions of about 30 celebrities as part of this initiative. Among them were Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton, and Tom Brady, who were previously associated with the now-defunct crypto exchange FTX.

Users can employ these AI avatars to manage their Facebook and Instagram accounts. The tools typically allow them to interact with other users and quickly generate content as if they were real celebrities.

However, despite their numerous advantages, AI clones (digital avatars designed to mimic human appearance and behavior) still have significant flaws. 

One major issue is that their mouth movements and gestures often don’t synchronize properly with the spoken words.

This mismatch creates an eerie, unsettling feeling in viewers, a phenomenon known as the “uncanny valley.” This term describes the discomfort people feel when something is almost, but not quite, human.