Boris Johnson-Winston Churchill conversation pioneers live AI interaction
23 Apr 2025 18:43
DUBAI (WAM)Former UK Prime Minister the Rt Hon Boris Johnson conducted a two-way conversation with the former UK Prime Minister the Rt Hon Winston Churchill during the Future of Government Communication Forum at the 2025 World Governments Summit, held in Dubai from February 11-13, 2025.The conversation was recorded at the 'Creator's HQ' during the 'Future of Government Communication Forum', organised by the UAE Government Media Office as part of the World Governments Summit (WGS) 2025, hosted in Dubai.The event was held in collaboration with the Emirati company "AI Media Lab," a subsidiary of Visioneers, which specialises in developing artificial intelligence solutions for key sectors, particularly the media.
Churchill's Speeches The conversation was enabled by a proprietary Large Language Model, an AI trained on Churchill's collected works, speeches and biographies of the former leader, including Johnson's celebrated biography of Churchill, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. 'The model is capable of spine-tingling fidelity, it was a truly uncanny conversation,' said Johnson after the recording. 'Having closely followed and researched Churchill's life, his views and his work, I was amazed to find myself literally face to face with a talking facsimile of Winston who was capable of holding a conversation that one would have said was truly with the man himself. Models like this have a real role in education, in helping people appreciate history in new ways.'The conversation was the first live, fully interactive meta-human avatar driven by a Large Language Model. It was conducted as a 'Video call with the past', using speech to text to LLM to text to speech technology and a 'meta-human' an emotionally contextual avatar of Churchill, whose synthesised voice was based on samples of Churchill's public speeches.The demonstration paves the way for the development of fully interactive capabilities for artificial intelligence.
Over the past 12 years, WGS has become one of the world's largest and most influential forum for governments. The 2025 summit's agenda featured 21 forums covering six key themes including health transformation, governance, and crisis mitigation.
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