Taobao (China) Software
- Registered name
- 淘宝（中国）软件有限公司
- Unified Social Credit Code
913301007682254698registered in Zhejiang 浙江- 淘宝直播 (Official)
Models and generation engines · Round-the-clock live commerce
Taobao (China) Software (淘宝（中国）软件有限公司), registered in Hangzhou on 7 December 2004 and wholly owned by a Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan legal person, is a software company of Alibaba Group’s Taobao business. With Taobao (浙江淘宝网络有限公司) it is a party to the Taobao Live platform service agreement, and Taobao’s digital-human patents are filed in its name, among them methods for showing information through a dynamic digital-human image (CN117596373B), for generating and interacting with digital-human video that imitates the user’s voice (published March 2024) and for driving digital humans (published March 2025).
Its Taobao Meta technology team (淘宝 Meta 技术团队), which also built the MNN inference engine, runs the real-time visual algorithm library PixelAI and is best known for TaoAvatar, a high-fidelity, real-time 3D full-body avatar solution based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. PixelAI has released several notable projects through its GitHub page, such as TaoAvatar and GaussianTalker, which support advanced AI-driven avatars with facial expressions, gestures, and real-time speech interaction. Their technologies are designed to work on mobile and AR devices, including the Apple Vision Pro, and since 2025 TaoAvatar has served as a 3D shopping guide in Taobao Vision flagship stores in Shanghai, Hangzhou and other cities. PixelAI has also developed tools for image enhancement, video restoration, real-time portrait segmentation, and AR-based product interaction (e.g., virtual try-ons), and has won awards in national broadcasting and AI competitions for its innovations in digital human and video processing technologies. TaoAvatar was presented at CVPR 2025 and open-sourced as MNN-TaoAvatar, and the team’s HRM²Avatar, which builds animatable 3D digital humans from ordinary phone video, was presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2025.
Zhiwen Chen (陈志文), a staff algorithm engineer in the team, is the project lead of TaoAvatar; Jianchuan Chen (陈建川) is its equal-contribution first author and also contributed to GaussianTalker.