TikTok Tests Digital Avatars, Realistic AI-Generated Narrators for Product Demos and How-To Ads

TikTok

TikTok is beta-testing Digital Avatars, a new creative product with select advertisers. Powered by AI, these avatars serve as narrators with physical movements, facial expressions, and voiceovers. Advertisers can choose from over 100 avatars varying in appearance, accents, and languages to be used for narrating product demos and how-to ads.

Why It Matters: Last year, many social platforms integrated AI tools, providing advertisers with the ability to create or modify assets for paid media ads. Digital Avatars, similar to AI Characters in TikTok's sister app, CapCut, offer advertisers realistic avatars that can star in content like humans.

While creators have been the go-to for paid media ads, AI now provides alternative options, bringing benefits such as cost efficiency and performance. Some advertisers may leverage AI over creators for these reasons, especially as it improves and becomes harder to distinguish from human-generated content.

But, a feature like this could also complement creators. Advertisers might use Digital Avatars as a test run to gauge how certain content may perform before engaging human creators to produce similar content.