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What is a Real-Time Digital Twin? | 2024

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Julia Szatar
min read
July 10, 2024
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Digital twins have been revolutionizing manufacturing, systems analysis, customer service, medical industries, marketing, and so much more. The value of digital twins - especially manufacturing and processes-related digital twins - lies in their ability to accelerate decision-making, promote sustainability, avoid critical mishaps, increase productivity, and more. 

Real-time digital twins, with their ability to adapt to new data constantly, are only adding to these benefits. We’ll explore what a real-time digital twin is and how organizations can benefit from real-time digital twin technology.

What is a Real-Time Digital Twin?

Digital twins are digital representations of real-world objects, people, or processes used to observe past and present data, simulate potential future outcomes, accelerate holistic understanding, and more.

Real-time digital twins receive data in a continuous stream, tracking dynamic information about a physical device to allow for optimized and constantly up-to-date analysis. These real-time digital twins help identify problems and speed up response times to such problems, and they allow for on-the-fly adjustments to reach optimal efficiency. 

For our purposes, we’ll focus on “people”-type digital twins, which are digital representations of human beings. When these digital twins have real-time capabilities, they can be created instantly and can interact with humans in real time.

An example of this would be Tavus’ talking-head digital twin. AI models at Tavus can generate your very own digital twin for instant video generation at scale.

Real-Time Digital Twin vs Traditional Digital Twin

Real-time and traditional digital twins are differentiated by how they make use of the data that creates and sustains them. Conventional digital twins collect data about an object and then store that data for later analysis, whether to find and address problems or to conduct simulations.

Real-time digital twins, on the other hand, utilize the data they receive immediately, allowing for in-the-moment use with up-to-date information. For example, you might generate your digital twin for use as a live chat avatar with real-time processing of customer preferences, creating a more engaging and personalized experience.

How Does Real-Time Digital Twin Technology Work? 

Digital twin technology gathers data from physical sensors (or, in the case of video-based digital twins, from sample videos) and uses the data to replicate the object, person, or process in a digital environment. Typically, digital twins store data and then perform analytics, since traditional methods of analysis have difficulty meeting the computational demands of real-time digital twins. 

That’s why real-time digital twins require scalable software architecture so they can analyze streaming data on the fly and provide faster responses. One method to address this need is the use of in-memory computing, which can deliver messages to digital twins within milliseconds.

Real-Time Digital Twin Examples & Use Cases 

A wide variety of industries already use digital twin technology. We’ll explore the importance of real-time integration for improving the effectiveness of digital twins in each of these applications.

Marketing & Sales 

Real-time digital twin technology for people-type digital twins learns the nuances of your facial expressions, movements, and voice rapidly. This allows your digital avatar to reflect you with a high level of precision. That speed enables personalized video generation at scale.

Another important feature you want from your digital twin generator is the ability to use your digital twin to create thousands of marketing and sales videos immediately while retaining that highly-realistic replica of your image and voice

That’s why Tavus is an excellent choice for your real-time digital twin. With scaled personalization options and unlimited video generation, you can create engaging sales videos to improve your conversion rates. 

Generate personalized marketing videos with Tavus’s real-time digital twin capabilities!

Construction 

Digital twins in the construction industry help streamline the planning, budget, design, and actual construction phases. Construction digital twins are virtual representations of buildings or infrastructure projects, using data from sensors, BIM models, and more to optimize performance and improve decision-making. 

If you make that digital twin real-time, with constant streams of data from the construction site, you can identify problems as they come up, rather than having to fix issues later and extend construction time. 

And once a building is constructed, its digital twin can monitor the entire structure, enabling in-the-moment repairs down the line to avoid safety issues or delayed solutions.

Education & Training 

When it comes to manufacturing, real-time digital twins can help provide manufacturing students with the opportunity to practice their skills with real-time simulations from actual systems. Digital twins give students the opportunity for hands-on learning without the risk of causing real-life problems.

Training and educational videos can also benefit from real-time, people-type digital twins. Platforms like Tavus can generate thousands of videos without the labor and long wait times of traditional recording. Educators can also choose to implement AI video-based chatbots where a digital twin can interact with human users in real time, providing an engaging chat experience.

Manufacturing 

Digital twins in manufacturing are used to replicate processes or systems. Manufacturers use these replicas to analyze, monitor, design, or optimize their processes without having to work in the field or conduct expensive physical trials.

With real-time digital twins, manufacturers can extend the usefulness of these replicas to allow for continuous monitoring of plants or other digital manufacturing processes. They can identify areas for potential optimization, safety issues, and more and conduct the needed repairs or changes immediately, saving time and money and increasing efficiency.

Benefits of Real-Time Digital Twins

Let’s explore the benefits of real-time integration for digital twins.

Enhances Personalization 

A primary benefit of real-time digital twins is the development of conversational AI, which uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to understand the context and intent of user inquiries. The ability to process human input and respond in a natural, conversational way enhances personalization and encourages connection between brands and their audiences. 

Increases Accuracy & Reliability 

A traditional digital twin is still a static model if it does not implement real-time data and analysis, creating the possibility that it may be accurate at one point and then potentially obsolete the next. A constant stream of data allows real-time digital twins to evolve alongside their physical counterparts with precision.

Improves Predictive Capabilities 

The moment-by-moment updates provided by real-time digital twins allows for immediate feedback on problems and trends. Such swift insights allow for improved predictive capabilities and provide opportunities to fix problems before or as they happen.

Improved predictive capabilities also benefit people-type digital twins. With the ability to predict where a conversation will go or what types of responses are most common for certain types of human input, real-time digital twins can improve how natural their interactions are.

Saves Time & Money  

For traditional digital twins, even the best infrastructure needs time for data to travel from its source to processing units, causing delays. With real-time digital twins, that travel and processing time is cut down to milliseconds, saving organizations time. And faster speeds mean problems can be addressed sooner, saving money on delayed repairs and time for systems to be shut down.

Challenges of Real-Time Digital Twins

Implementing real-time capabilities in digital twins introduces some challenges. Transmission delays still exist, even with the best infrastructure, and complex or high-volume processing can also introduce low latency. Add in network congestion as a result of high traffic or limited bandwidth, and you may be left with even further delays.

That’s why it’s so important to choose the right technology for your real-time digital twin needs. For people-type digital twins, Tavus is one of the top choices on the market. Users need only invest the time of a single sample recording to create their digital twin, and then they can generate unlimited personalized videos in minutes!

How to Create a Real-Time Digital Twin for Video 

Looking to create your own real-time digital twin for video with Tavus? Here’s how to make AI videos in a nutshell.

Step 1: Record your general message 

All Tavus needs is one baseline video! Record yourself speaking your chosen script, making sure to keep your face clearly visible, and upload it to Tavus.

Step 2: Personalize your template 

Once you have your template video, select the words or phrases that you want personalized for each individual video message. Provide Tavus with each individual’s data (including name, preferences, and personalized CTAs), and let Tavus do the rest.

Step 3: Generate unlimited videos with a real-time digital twin 

We’ll use your digital twin and Tavus’ text-to-speech capabilities to create thousands of high-quality videos for each and every one of your customers! No need for lengthy editing processes or costly recording sessions.

Make Your Own Real-Time Digital Twin With Tavus 

If you want to generate your own real-time digital twin for video generation at scale, you’re in the right place. Tavus’ generative AI allows you to create unlimited videos in minutes so you can make digital twin videos with realistic, real-time interactions. 

Don’t let your business fall behind with costly and time-consuming video creation. Explore the power of Tavus’ high-quality AI tools today!

Enable real-time digital twin technology with Tavus API.

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