Clone Your Own AI to Take Online Classes

As the world starts to work and study remotely, a foreign engineer can't stand the daily video conferences, so he uses AI technology to "clone" himself to attend the meetings on his behalf. If this technology is used by students, the consequences will be...

Due to this epidemic that has swept the world, companies have switched to remote work, and major universities have also closed their campuses and switched to online classes.

It has changed the way the world works, and also changed the way students attend classes, defend their papers, and even graduate.

However, the limitations of remote work and online classes have given some people the opportunity to come up with a variety of ways to "go slacking off", such as the following two outstanding students:

However, these "little clever tricks" are still a little weaker than the advanced way of skipping work used by a foreign engineer.

Clone an AI of your own and hold meetings for me

Video conferencing is not suitable for everyone. Some people on Twitter complained that they are now living in a Zoom world.

Microsoft Teams added 12 million new users in just one week, growing from 32 million to 44 million (March 11 to March 18), and the daily meeting time exceeded 2.7 billion minutes.

In just over two months, Zoom's user base has increased 20-fold to 200 million.

However, a foreign engineer Matt Reed  He also published an article recently saying that he could not stand the endless Zoom meetings.

So, he opened his mind and built a The AI-driven cloning project Zoombot can clone a virtual image of itself and participate in video conferences.

This avatar uses the latest AI speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion,Attending Zoom meetings on his behalf,Not only can you show your image, but you can also answer questions.

Watching the video of his actual demonstration, that mechanical and magical "Hahahaha" is not meant to be funny, right?

At first, it was difficult for everyone to realize that the Reed who appeared in the meeting window was a "clone", but his stiff tone of voice immediately revealed the whole thing.

If the technology is more advanced, I might be able to get away with it.

Photos, voice recognition library, virtual camera, done!

According to Reed, this seemingly advanced "stand-in project" is not difficult to implement. He also kindly provided a tutorial and published it on GitHub:

https://github.com/mcreed/zoombot

It turns out, he writes, that cloning yourself is much easier than cloning your brain in Westworld.

First, he opens Quicktime and goes to File->New Movie Recording, where heI captured some of my own video images;

Next, based on Artyom.js Open Source Library(a speech recognition JavaScript library), built a simple web application, and extended it to understand and respond to some simple conversations, such as:

Human: "How are you?"

AI: "I'm fine, thank you for your greeting."

Human: "Do you understand?"

AI: "I can't hear you clearly."

Human: "Goodbye."

AI: "I'll talk to you guys later. Stay safe."

After setting up simple conversations like this, use a software called ManyCam, with webapp as the source.Create a virtual camera.Set up your Zoom webcam as a virtual camera.

At this point, everything is ready. Just turn on the speaker, start Zoombot, and then you can happily do what you like (mo).

According to reports, the Zoombot project took only about four hours to build, and Reed spent about four hours conducting Zoom meetings and recording colleagues' real reactions (without telling his colleagues before the trial).

Author Reed reminds: "The trick to using a stand-in is to leave the meeting room before the conversation is over, because once you get into the endless cycle of 'I can't hear you, can you repeat it again?', that's trouble."

In addition, Reed also pointed outOne of the nice things about this program is that you don’t have to give it a wake-up word like “Hey, Siri” to start using it.

As long as there is a voice trigger from the outside world, it can respond and then give a reply with facial movements.

I have to say that this engineer was very dedicated in slacking off.

Don't want to take online classes? Clone yourself to take them for you

Seeing this, a classmate couldn't help but think:This trick can be used in online classes!(Manual wit .gif here)

Many students have experienced this, and have been in a state of fear of being dominated by online classes since the winter vacation. Because they are not happy with online classes, they even went to major app stores to give DingTalk a one-star rating in retaliation.

But no matter how many stars you give it, you still have to take online classes. In order to avoid online classes, many students have used all kinds of tricks (see the GIF above). Some people even uploaded a guide to skipping online classes on Bilibili.

Reminder: Non-professionals, please do not imitate

But now, with AI cloning technology, skipping online classes can become very advanced.

According to the "cloning" guide provided by Reed,It only takes 7 steps to easily create a virtual self.

1. Replace the photos in the img folder in the Zoombot project;

2. Put all these files on a server running https://, otherwise Chrome will throw a security error and won’t be able to access your microphone;

3. Visit your Zoombot https:// URL in Chrome;

4. Turn on Zoombot using the top left button and it will start listening for all of those key phrases;

5. Create a virtual webcam using Chrome as the source. (The author uses ManyCam to do this);

6. Set your Zoom camera as "ManyCam Virtual Webcam";

7. Turn on the speaker and let your Zoombot start working!

If you can prepare the question and answer data of the knowledge points of this class before class and hand it over to Zoombot, you don’t have to worry about the teacher’s sudden questions, and reciting the text and spelling words may be no problem.

And you can sleep, watch TV series and play games...So, do you want to give it a try?

But, then again, you are the one taking the exam in the end, so instead of spending all this time thinking about it, it is better to concentrate on the class.

Otherwise, the tears you shed during the exam will be the result of your skipping classes...

Regarding AI "cloning", which one is your ideal use? Welcome to participate in the vote:

1. Let AI hold meetings for me

2. Let AI take online classes for me

3. I have a new idea

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