Volcano Engine
- Chinese name
- 火山引擎
- Pinyin
- Registered name
- 北京火山引擎科技有限公司
- Unified Social Credit Code
91110108MA01R70K8Dregistered in Beijing 北京- Website
- 7453428367
Hyperscaler platforms · Models and generation engines · Compute and real-time rendering
Volcano Engine (北京火山引擎科技有限公司), registered in Beijing’s Haidian district on 11 May 2020 with capital of one billion yuan, is ByteDance’s cloud and AI services company, a single-shareholder subsidiary within the ByteDance group. It sells cloud, large-model and audio-video services under the Volcano Engine (火山引擎) brand and holds the ICP filing for volcengine.com (京ICP备20018813号).
It provides Volcano Engine’s virtual digital human (虚拟数字人) product. The user agreement for its Chimera (奇美拉) digital-human platform names it as the provider; it registered the software copyright for a virtual digital human application platform (虚拟数字人应用平台, V1.0) in 2022; and the platform was among the first to receive the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology’s certification of basic digital-human system capabilities, in June 2022. Its virtual digital humans are sold as service-type digital employees that talk to customers in place of human staff.
Deployments include a virtual digital human made by Volcano Engine that guided visitors through Smart Beijing technologies in the Beijing pavilion at the sixth Digital China Summit, and, at Xi’an’s Great Tang Everbright City (大唐不夜城), an animated Li Bai from the film “Chang’an 30,000 Miles” placed atop the Big Wild Goose Pagoda through mobile augmented reality, with Volcano Engine as ByteDance’s technology partner.
The deep-synthesis algorithm behind the product, the Volcano Engine virtual digital human algorithm (火山引擎虚拟数字人算法), was filed with the Cyberspace Administration of China in August 2023 by ByteDance’s Beijing operating company, Beijing Douyin Information Service (北京抖音信息服务有限公司), for use in Douyin, Toutiao and Xigua Video.