Hi #smartcommunity friends! In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast I have a great conversation with Elisabeth L’Orange. Elisabeth is the co-founder of Oxolo, a Hamburg based company that specialises in virtualizing people by creating AI-powered chatbot avatars indistinguishable from reality, and ready to engage and communicate. In this episode Elisabeth starts by telling us about her background in law and startups, her passion for the planet, ethics and human rights as well as her passion for her kids and the outdoors. Elisabeth then shares with us what a Smart Community means to her, we discuss how certain biases can affect data sets and Elisabeth explains what synthetic data is. Elisabeth then tells us a bit about her company Oxolo and the work they do, what inspired her to get into the AI space and shares with us some use cases where AI benefits society and can improve the community. We finish our chat discussing the emerging trends of synthetic media. As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it!

Listen here: 

What we cover in this episode:

• Elisabeth’s background in law and startups 
• Her passion for the planet, ethics and human rights as well as her kids and nature 
• What a Smart Community means to Elisabeth 
• How certain biases can affect data sets 
• Elisabeth explains what synthetic data is 
• A bit about Elisabeth’s company Oxolo and what they do 
• What inspired Elisabeth to get into this space 
• Some use cases where AI benefits society and can improve the community
• The emerging trend of synthetic media 

Quotes: 

“I think the community approach should be that everybody is involved, nobody’s left behind, everybody’s taken care of, and people take care of each other, from all different kinds of perspectives. So from a tech point of view, from a social point of view, from a political point of view. I think [we] need to tackle community ideas from all different angles.”

“I think it’s every sort of decision you take in that area needs a new sort of interdisciplinary teams, you know, because so the main problem when if we dive into ethics or data, you know, the main problems, or main problem we have is that AI is mostly trained on biased data sets.”

“If you have data sets of people walking, it’s mostly from airports, watching businessmen going on business trips. So it’s a very certain demographic, and the problem is that that’s ingrained and burned into these systems, there has to be more diversity in the background monitoring.”

“[Oxolo] just launched our first product that’s called Vime, and we do one click ecommerce product videos. So you could just put in your URL, and you receive a product video with a real human talking about the product, with imagery of the product, [and] all the information about the product, and it just comes back as an mp4.”

“We are talking to a bunch of news anchors [and] journalists who also want to combat fake news, so they would like to translate themselves into all languages to just get the word out there, to make sure that they’re not misunderstood or misrepresented.”

“Synthetic media is the future because not everybody is able to spend that kind of money on media, and has a massive media budget and wants to generate or create this much content themselves, but they all need the content. So synthetic media and virtual influencers, that’s the future, because it is nonstop content generation is just tiring for most people.”

“I feel like sometimes, AI gets a little bit of a bad rap, which is totally unjustified. Even your spam filter has AI in it. That’s the basis of it, that’s the most basic function. And everybody uses it [and] nobody thinks about it twice.”

“Every aspect of life, health care and education, the workforce, transportation, just infrastructure in general, can be really improved by working on the data, and the effects [data can have] when you work together. But it’s a question of time.”

Links: 

Oxolo Website 

Connect:

Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community 

Connect with Elisabeth via LinkedIn 

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community  

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube

The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital