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China Unicom, one of China's three state-owned telecommunications operators, has developed a substantial portfolio of digital human products and platforms since 2020, positioning itself as an active participant in a market dominated by dedicated artificial intelligence and technology companies. The company's digital human efforts are led primarily by Unicom Online, a wholly-owned subsidiary, and specifically its Wo Music division, which began dedicated research and development in 2021 and built a proprietary creation platform known as the Cloud Creation Digital Human Creation System. While China Unicom was the first Chinese telecom operator to launch a hyperrealistic digital human, the broader market remains firmly led by companies such as Baidu, Huawei Cloud, and Xiaoice (小冰), which together command the largest shares of a rapidly expanding industry valued at 4.12 billion yuan in 2024, according to IDC, with projected growth to 25.05 billion yuan by 2029. China Unicom does not appear in any major independent ranking of top digital human companies, and its projected digital human revenue of approximately 100 million yuan represents roughly 2.4 percent of the total market. Even among telecom operators, China Mobile has achieved greater visibility in the space.
The company's first major digital human debut came in October 2021 with the launch of An Weixi (安未希), a hyperrealistic virtual figure whose name was composed to evoke the meaning of an unknown future full of hope, approached with composed equanimity. Created at China Unicom's 5G and AI Future Image Creation Center using AI performance animation, real-time motion capture, voice synthesis, and human face modeling technologies, An Weixi was designed with singing, dancing, and emotional interaction capabilities and was openly positioned as a virtual idol candidate. However, actual deployment proved limited. Her debut video on Bilibili attracted only around 1,126 views, and no evidence exists of sustained influencer activity, major brand campaigns, or viral cultural moments. An Weixi functioned more as a technology demonstration and proof of concept than as a commercially successful virtual influencer, and China Unicom's later digital humans received considerably more attention and operational deployment.
Among those later creations, COCO (可可) emerged as a more durably deployed digital human. Developed by Unicom Wo Music and first used for Winter Olympics news broadcasting in early 2022, COCO made her major public debut at the fifth China International Import Expo in November 2022. Described as a beautiful and intellectual female figure, COCO was paired with another virtual anchor named vivi and has since been deployed across news broadcasting, event hosting, and customer service functions. By 2024, COCO was serving as an AI intelligent customer service representative at the China Unicom Partner Conference, greeting users and handling service interactions. The platform supporting COCO and its sibling products offers verified capabilities including speech synthesis through neural network-based text-to-speech, natural language processing, and integration with hundred-billion-parameter large language models fused with knowledge graphs. Voice cloning and digital human image customization services are available at the platform level, and the system supports multiple image modes for user selection, though background personalization as a standalone feature specific to COCO is not explicitly documented.
China Unicom's digital human portfolio extends well beyond individual virtual figures into a structured, multi-tier product matrix spanning six price levels. At the most accessible tier, personal digital humans can be generated from photographs in seconds through mini-program templates for as little as ten yuan. At the mid-range, a Digital Human Anchor product enables text-driven or audio-driven broadcast video production with one-click generation, while a Digital Human Livestream product provides real-time rendering and unattended 24-hour livestreaming to platforms including JD.com, Taobao, Kuaishou, and Meituan. Higher tiers offer interactive digital humans powered by large language models and industry-specific knowledge bases, deployable via web interfaces and paired with hardware kiosks for use in government offices, hospitals, airports, and exhibition halls. The most premium offering involves fully custom hyperrealistic digital humans built through a complete pipeline from concept art through 3D modeling, rigging, and motion and lip-sync driving, with ultra-high-definition video output. A separate digital employee product bundles AI-powered interactive kiosks with cloud computing and multimodal interaction for retail and campus environments. Across these products, China Unicom has deployed approximately 7,000 digital humans within its own operations.
The technological infrastructure supporting this ecosystem is anchored by several internally developed platforms. The AI Future Imaging System encompasses four subsystems handling 8K video capture, 4K ultra-high-definition livestreaming, naked-eye 3D video production, augmented reality imaging, and digital human creation. The uniXR low-code development platform integrates 3D content creation, simulation interaction, motion capture, and digital human livestreaming, bridging Unity and Unreal Engine with building information modeling and geographic information systems. The Yuan Jing large language model, first released at Mobile World Congress Barcelona in February 2024 and upgraded to version 2.0 in July 2024, provides a 204-billion-parameter multimodal foundation with text-to-image generation and one-shot voice cloning. The model architecture spans variants from one billion to 700 billion parameters, received dual filing approval from the Cyberspace Administration of China, and earned highest-level certification from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. Underlying all of this is a computing infrastructure of more than 60 nodes nationwide with distributed storage and 5G mobile edge computing integrated with a national content delivery network.
China Unicom's digital human applications have found particular traction in government and cultural tourism contexts. In March 2023, the company launched a hyperrealistic digital version of Liu Sanjie (刘三姐), a legendary folk figure of the Zhuang ethnic group, as Guangxi province's digital cultural tourism ambassador, making it the first provincial-level hyperrealistic tourism digital ambassador in China. The project was originally created using Baidu Intelligent Cloud's Xiling platform before being enhanced by Unicom Online, and it was recognized as a typical case in the China Internet Association's China Digital Human Development Report published in September 2024. In Guangdong province, AI digital human broadcasters modeled on actual prosecutors were deployed in Qingyuan's Yangshan and Lianshan counties for legal education, case updates, and public services. At a national scale, China Unicom serves more than 20 national ministries, 31 provincial digital government projects, over 750 smart city projects, and 17,000 administrative villages, while operating the industry's largest centralized customer contact center with more than 10,000 agents handling over 120 million monthly calls for 420 million users, with a smart service ratio exceeding 85 percent and customer satisfaction above 98 percent. The 2025 launch of Ai Wenwen (艾雯雯), a digital guide for the National Museum of China's digital cloud exhibition, and the showcase of multilingual digital human tourism services at Mobile World Congress Barcelona in March 2025 further illustrate the company's emphasis on cultural and institutional deployment.
In December 2022, China Unicom formalized a broader metaverse strategy built on three pillars: a strong foundation of seven engines spanning network, computing power, AI, data, digital identity, 3D, and extended reality; the uniVerse platform, described as a fully domestically developed metaverse environment; and an ecosystem driven by the Metaverse Innovation Industry Alliance, which China Unicom led with approximately 100 founding member organizations including Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, Xiaomi, ByteDance, iFlytek, Xiaoice, and major research institutions such as the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and Tsinghua University. The company published a companion white paper on metaverse science, technology innovation, and industry application. Confirmed direct partnerships include collaboration with Baidu on service-oriented digital humans and with iFlytek on AI platform solutions, while Xiaoice participates as an alliance founding member. In August 2024, China Unicom unveiled the Qiankun Digital Culture Platform as an umbrella connecting consumer and industrial internet through a capability system comprising one computing base, two platforms, three standardized products, and four industry solutions.
The regulatory environment surrounding China Unicom's digital human operations is evolving rapidly. On April 3, 2026, the Cyberspace Administration of China published draft Measures for the Administration of Digital Virtual Human Information Services, a five-chapter, 27-article regulatory framework open for public comment until May 6, 2026. The draft requires digital humans to display a prominent and continuous label, mandates explicit separate consent for the use of sensitive personal information in digital human modeling, prohibits the creation of identifiable digital humans of specific persons without consent, bars the provision of virtual intimate relationships to minors, and requires respect for intellectual property rights in content used by digital humans. Oversight responsibilities are distributed across multiple agencies, with the CAC coordinating and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Public Security, Culture and Tourism, Health, Market Supervision, Financial Regulation, Broadcasting, Publishing, Film, and Copyright agencies sharing sectoral responsibilities, with additional rules specified for healthcare, finance, news publishing, and film. This followed an earlier and distinct set of interim measures published in late December 2025 governing human-like interactive AI services, focused specifically on AI systems simulating human personality and emotional interaction such as AI companion applications.
China Unicom occupies a distinctive position in China's digital human landscape as a state-owned telecommunications operator applying digital human technology primarily across its own vast service infrastructure and select government and cultural projects, rather than operating a major platform business serving thousands of external enterprise clients in the manner of market leaders. Its product matrix is genuine and technically substantiated, its creation infrastructure is proprietary and operationally productive, and its government relationships afford it deployment opportunities that pure technology companies may not as easily access. The company co-hosted the 2024 China Digital Human Application Capability Competition with the China Internet Association, reinforcing its role as a convener and institutional participant in the field. Yet its projected revenue remains a small fraction of the overall market, it does not appear in any independent industry ranking, and the capabilities it markets across digital live broadcasting, motion capture, and video production are distributed across distinct products at different price tiers rather than offered as a single integrated solution. China Unicom is best understood as a committed, operationally active, and institutionally embedded participant in a market whose commercial leadership belongs to dedicated AI and technology companies.
[Apr 2026]