Photo/JD.com's WeiChat account

In 40 minutes, 100,000 orders were placed, with 20 million views, resulting in a total transaction value of 50 million yuan.

Digital human live streaming is not a new phenomenon, but Richard Liu, the “Number 1 Agent” from JD.com, has single-handedly raised the bar for expectations in digital human live streaming.

"Stiff body, monotonous movements", "lack of interaction, like a robot without emotions" - these voices and discussions are not only about the performance of AI Richard Liu's live broadcast, but also reflect the reality that the entire digital human track has not yet made any breakthroughs.

Despite mixed opinions from the public, the discussion generated over two days also produced traffic. Consumer support came partly from trust in Richard Liu as a business magnate and founder of JD.com, and partly from the substantial product discounts and the flurry of virtual red envelopes in the live broadcast.

Humans tire, but digital humans do not. Digital human live broadcasts can fill idle time slots, offer high replicability, and incur low costs, which are precisely the advantages that businesses value most.

Behind AI Richard Liu is JD Cloud’s full-stack proprietary technology product. Data shows that JD Cloud’s digital human, Yanxi, has fully settled into JD’s purchasing live broadcast room, serving over 4,000 brands and increasing idle time conversion by more than 30%.

The JD Cloud Yanxi team told NBD that they fine-tuned the model on certain details. The initial speech materials fed to the large model were too formal. To address this, the team used newly recorded casual conversations, including Richard Liu's travel stories, as the main material. They then extracted the rhythmic features of a 5-minute speech to “infuse” into the large model, achieving a more natural effect.

Just last month, the number of effective stores for third-party merchants on JD surpassed one million.

On this basis, on April 18th, at the JD 618 Merchant Ecosystem Partner Conference, Xu Ran, CEO of JD Group, stated that this year’s 618 will see upgrades in three areas: traffic ecosystem, AI technology, and services. These upgrades aim to help over 150,000 small and medium-sized merchants increase their 618 sales by more than 50% year-on-year, and to increase the number of merchants with sales over one million by more than 100% year-on-year.