Manila, Philippines – Local livestreaming platform Kumu and Google Cloud have announced a partnership in order to build AI tools to assist content creators in terms of entertainment, education, and customer service.
This collaboration between Kumu and Google Cloud aims to encourage more startups and enterprises alike to embrace the power of generative AI and to understand how this technology can best complement and strengthen their businesses.
At a showcase event at the Google office in the Philippines, Rexy Dorado, co-founder and president at Kumu, showcased a live demo of “Crisostomo A.I. Barra”, Kumu’s first AI streamer who can respond to questions about Philippine history (even beyond what’s written in “Noli Me Tangere”, the novel that his character and personality was based on), the Kumu app, and general pop culture. Dorado also gave the attendees a sneak peek into other AI avatars in the pipeline: AI game show hosts, fortune tellers, tutors, tour guides, and customer support agents.
An early adopter of Google Cloud’s generative AI capabilities for businesses, Kumu has been building its AI streamer and other AI avatars using Google Cloud’s PaLM 2 for Text and Chat first-party models, Embeddings for text and images, and Generative AI Studio – all of which can be accessed through the Vertex AI platform.
For the company, it has always sought ways to make Filipino content more fun and engaging with innovative technology. They added that as soon as generative AI started gaining traction, Kumu looked to an AI-first company like Google Cloud to explore how the technology could be applied to enhance its live content experiences.
