TikTok introduces AI-powered digital avatars for brands, enabling multilingual ad campaigns with customizable voices and accents. Discover how this new feature is set to transform social media advertising.

TikTok is set to revolutionize digital advertising with the introduction of AI-powered "digital avatars." These innovative avatars allow brands to create highly personalized and multilingual promotional content, potentially transforming how products are marketed on the platform.

AI-Powered Avatars: The Next Big Thing in Digital Advertising


On June 17, TikTok announced the expansion of its Symphony ad suite with two groundbreaking features: "stock avatars" and an "AI dubbing" tool. These features are designed to help brands effortlessly create and localize content across multiple languages, significantly broadening their reach.


Stock Avatars: Real Actors, Digital Precision

The stock avatars are based on video footage of real actors, licensed for commercial use. Brands can select these AI-powered avatars to deliver their messages in various voices and accents, tailored to their target audience. This technology uses a text-to-speech tool that can dub over the actors with voices in ten supported languages and dialects, including English, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean.


A demonstration video revealed that the AI can mimic mouth movements to match the dubbed language, providing a more natural viewing experience. Scripts for these avatars can even be generated by AI, making the content creation process seamless and efficient.


Custom Avatars for Content Creators

In addition to stock avatars, TikTok is testing "custom avatars" within its creator community. These custom avatars clone the likeness of content creators and brand spokespeople, offering the same multilingual capabilities as the stock versions. This feature aims to maintain the personal touch of familiar faces while leveraging the power of AI for broader audience engagement.


Ensuring Transparency with AI-Generated Content

To maintain transparency, TikTok will automatically label videos created with its AI tools as AI-generated. A demonstration video shows a small box in the corner of the screen indicating the content is AI-produced. This transparency is crucial for maintaining user trust as the platform integrates more AI-driven features.


Challenges and the Road Ahead

While TikTok’s AI avatars hold great promise, they are not without their challenges. The demonstration video highlighted some imperfections, such as mismatched mouth movements and gestures, often referred to as the "uncanny valley" effect. Despite these minor glitches, the potential for AI avatars to enhance advertising effectiveness is substantial.


TikTok vs. Meta: The AI Avatar Battle

TikTok’s foray into AI avatars follows a similar move by Meta, which launched AI chatbots resembling celebrities like Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg, and Tom Brady. These AI clones manage Facebook and Instagram accounts, engaging with users on a more personal level. TikTok’s introduction of AI avatars signifies its commitment to staying at the forefront of digital innovation and competing with major players like Meta.


TikTok’s AI-powered digital avatars are poised to change the landscape of social media marketing. By enabling brands to create personalized, multilingual content with ease, TikTok is offering a powerful tool to reach diverse audiences worldwide. As these features move beyond beta testing and become widely available, they could become a staple in the digital marketing strategies of brands across various industries.


Stay tuned to see how these AI innovations unfold and how they might influence your next marketing campaign. With TikTok’s AI avatars, the future of advertising is here, and it speaks your language.


(JESSE COGHLAN, COINTELEGRAPH, 2024)