(Yicai) March 25 -- More than 70,000 vendors are already using JD.Com’s digital human hosts for live-streamed online sales, the Chinese internet giant has said.

The cost of using a digital human as livestream host has now fallen to one-10th that of a real person, and the gross merchandise volume generated by them reached tens of billions of Chinese yuan, equivalent to billions of US dollars, last year, JD.Com said yesterday at a press conference held to share its progress in artificial intelligence.

The Beijing-based company made the avatars free to all of its merchants last December.

Expectations around the appearance and capabilities of digital humans are increasing, and vendors want them to become increasingly like real hosts, an executive from JD.Com’s digital human and AI-generated content department told Yicai. More work will be done to improve how digital humans interact with viewers so as to boost audience stickiness in livestream studios, he said.

But enhancing that experience will require not only further technical upgrades by JD.Com, but also database updates, the executive noted. Merchants need to upload more after-sales information related to the products they sell so the digital humans can expand their knowledge base and improve the quality of their interactions with viewers, he said.

JD.Com also announced that it plans to leverage its strengths across retail, logistics, industrial operations, food delivery and home services to build the world’s largest and most comprehensive embodied intelligence data collection centre. In the process, the company will mobilize more than 100,000 employees and up to 500,000 outside participants from various industries, in what it described as “the largest data collection campaign in human history.”

The goal is to accumulate five million hours of real-world human-scene video data within a year and more than 10 million hours within two years, while simultaneously collecting one million hours of robot body data, JD.Com said.

JoyInside, its embodied intelligence brand, has formed deep ties with nearly 100 home appliance and furniture brands, as well as more than 40 robotics and AI toy brands, according to JD.Com.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev