AutoNavi
- Chinese name
- 高德地图
- Pinyin
- Registered name
- 北京高德图强科技有限公司
- Unified Social Credit Code
91110105MA04GFMD5Mregistered in Beijing 北京
Models and generation engines · Digital employee in industry and infrastructure
AutoNavi (高德), the mapping and navigation group behind Amap (高德地图) and a wholly-owned Alibaba subsidiary since 2014, brought digital humans into turn-by-turn navigation at consumer scale. In September 2022 Amap launched Xiaogao Laoshi (小高老师), a virtual digital navigator released with Amap v12 and the company’s Shijie (视界) rendering engine — the first application of digital-human technology to the navigation scene, with a visualised persona, body movement and voice interaction, its voice recorded by voice actor Shan Xin (山新). Product lead Sun Chong (孙冲) framed the launch as scene-first: the company had digital humans in research well before 2022 and productised only once the navigation fit was established. By the October 2025 National Day holiday the digital navigator was being called 2.6 billion times a day.
In May 2025 the company open-sourced FantasyTalking, the audio-driven digital-human engine underneath its video digital humans, which generates a controllable talking figure from a single image. Amap’s own privacy policy names Beijing Gaode Tuqiang Technology (北京高德图强科技有限公司) as the provider of Amap’s products and services; that company was set up on 25 October 2021 in Chaoyang District, with registered capital of RMB 19 million and legal representative Liu Zhenfei (刘振飞), and also holds the Amap brand’s Weibo account. Two other AutoNavi companies sit alongside it: AutoNavi Software (高德软件有限公司), incorporated in 2001, holds the group’s surveying-and-mapping licences and was named as Amap’s provider in earlier versions of the policy, and AutoNavi Information Technology (高德信息技术有限公司) publishes the Amap iOS app.