Fan Xiang

← Teaching / Student work

Sophie hosting a 1990s call-in show and a participant speaking with AI Sophie
AI Sophie connects a 1990s radio host with a present-day participant through a reconstructed conversational voice.

Student work · 2025

AI Sophie

Talking with a 1990s Call-in Show

Beginning with the Shenzhen late-night radio program A Break at Service Station, this project uses voice cloning and a large language model to reconstruct the host Sophie as a conversational digital presence.

Thirty-eight archived broadcasts, approximately forty hours of cassette recordings, and nearly 60,000 Chinese characters of Sophie’s writing shape a mobile call-in experience that reconnects listeners with the voices and urban memory of 1990s Shenzhen.

Authors
Tongge Yu · Fan Xiang
Student
Tongge Yu · first author
Selected
ACM SIGGRAPH Art Papers · 2025
Publication
Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques 8(3), Article 41
View project ↗Read the ACM paper ↗
Sophie working in a Shenzhen radio station during the 1990s
Sophie in a Shenzhen radio station during the 1990s.
Vintage radio-inspired mobile interface for calling AI Sophie
The mobile interface uses an FM 89.8 dial and a sliding call control.
Six-step workflow for speaking with AI Sophie
The interaction sequence: listen, connect, speak, and continue a conversation with Sophie.
System architecture for the AI Sophie digital reconstruction
Digital Sophie combines broadcast archives, written memories, speech recognition, language generation, and voice cloning.

The featured image was provided by the project author. Research figures are reproduced from the authors’ ACM paper under CC BY 4.0.