SHANGHAI, July 30, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — At the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) on July 26th, Soul App unveiled its AI-powered social solutions. In a live demonstration of its “Audio Partyroom”, the platform showcased its upgraded end-to-end full-duplex voice large language model (LLM), where an AI host seamlessly moderated group voice chats. The session highlighted how AI reshapes content and social dynamics — delivering smarter, more authentic, and deeply immersive emotional experiences.
“In this era where technology redefines human connection, AI-powered social networks aren’t just the future—they’re the present”, declared Tao Ming, Chief Technology Officer of Soul App. “We’re architecting a revolutionary paradigm where AI beings and humans don’t merely interact but thrive together. Through intelligent connection mapping, contextual understanding, and experience augmentation, Soul is cultivating a new dimension of digital belonging—one that delivers genuine joy and transforms how we perceive community”.
Toward More Natural AI Interaction: Full-Duplex Voice & Video for Genuine Emotional Connection
As technological advancements mature in 2025, the “AI application explosion” has become an industry consensus. Amid AI’s sweeping transformation across sectors, a question remains: What concrete value does “AI+” bring to individuals?
Representing the forefront of AI social exploration, Soul App presented its vision at WAIC 2025, demonstrating social solutions that redefine AI’s role in human connections.
At the exhibition themed “Soul’s AI Social Practice”, the platform highlighted how its full-duplex audio/video capabilities enable hyper-realistic and deeply immersive social experiences. Soul’s AI serves dual roles: as a caring companion that analyzes users’ social challenges to provide emotional support, and as an efficient connector that identifies mutual interests between users to foster genuine friendships.
The event marked the debut of Soul’s self-developed, end-to-end full-duplex voice model. Recently upgraded, this innovative model redefines the interaction paradigm by eliminating traditional reliance on Voice Activity Detection (VAD) mechanism and latency control logic. It breaks away from the industry’s prevalent turn-taking dialogue mode, empowering AI to autonomously determine conversation rhythms.
Social interaction involves the exchange of both emotional and informational value. By endowing AI with autonomy and warmth, Soul enables truly reciprocal social engagement and emotional symbiosis between humans and AI, moving beyond the transactional turn-based dialogues of the past.
The full-duplex voice model will soon enter beta testing before being implemented across various scenarios, including virtual human real-time calls and AI-assisted matching in both one-on-one and group settings. At WAIC, attendees experienced this technology firsthand through an AI host managing group voice chats on Soul’s platform.
In multi-user voice interactions, the AI host demonstrates human-like moderation capabilities, naturally engaging participants, energizing conversations, and encouraging discussion—significantly enhancing engagement and experience quality. “Applying full-duplex voice technology to group scenarios represents a crucial step in integrating AI into social networks, enhancing real connections, and enabling diverse experiences”, said Tao Ming, Soul’s CTO.
Recognizing users’ inherent preference for face-to-face interaction, Soul is also advancing multimodal capabilities. The exhibition featured the company’s latest progress in full-duplex real-time video call, combining audio technology with real-time video generation to let users see “the AI’s visual presence and digital environment,” creating more dimensional digital personas that deepen relational bonds. This builds on Soul’s recent achievement of having its real-time portrait video generation research accepted by CVPR 2025, a top-tier international academic conference.
Soul Reimagines Social Networking: Building an AI-Powered Playground for Chinese Gen Z
Since its launch in 2016, Soul has been at the forefront of reinventing social discovery, connection, and relationship-building through AI. The platform empowers users to express themselves in a pressure-free environment while forming diverse social networks based on shared interests—exemplified by its Lingxi Engine, the foundation of its current relationship model.
Soul’s AI journey accelerated in 2020 with systematic AIGC R&D, yielding cutting-edge capabilities in intelligent dialogue, voice technology, and 3D digital humans. The 2023 introduction of its proprietary Soul X model marked a turning point, followed by breakthroughs including voice generation, voice call, and music generation models. By 2024, Soul had consolidated these into a comprehensive multimodal end-to-end AI system supporting text/voice conversations, multilingual understanding, and hyper-realistic digital humans.
The platform’s competitive edge stems from three pillars: in-house R&D, unique public social data assets, and rapid application iteration. As a social networking platform, Soul continuously refines its “Emotional Intelligence Model” to precisely identify user needs and deliver lasting emotional value through AI.
Soul’s deep market insights—drawn from its user community—directly inform product development. Notably, 18% of new posts on Soul Square address real social challenges (making friends, starting conversations, workplace relationships). These authentic user stories and the emotional connections they spark form a valuable “social behavior database”.
Building on these insights, Soul is deepening AI-community integration by developing content recommendations and AI-assisted creation tools that lower expression barriers, while also cultivating an ecosystem of “Virtual Influencers” capable of delivering warm, nuanced emotional support—all working in concert to create authentic senses of emotional closeness within digital spaces.
At its core, the platform operates on a dual approach: facilitating human connections through AI assistance while simultaneously fostering meaningful “AI-as-companion” relationships”. True AI integration isn’t just about technology—it’s about weaving genuine emotional connections into the very fabric of users’ social networks”, explained Tao Ming, Soul’s CTO. “As AI becomes deeply embedded in every aspect of modern interaction—from socializing to digital lifestyles and consumer behavior—it’s giving rise to what we call emotional-value commerce. This evolution isn’t merely creating new market opportunities; it’s fundamentally reimagining the paradigms of social products”.
