(ORDO NEWS) — With the help of deepfake technology, MyHeritage not only brought Porter Harry Houdini to life, but also allowed him to speak and tell his biography.
First the animation, now the voice. The next step, apparently, will be the opportunity to talk with the “digital clone” of the deceased relative
Deep Nostalgia, previously created by MyHeritage to animate dead people‘s portraits, has gone viral, with over 100 million animations since then. Now the genealogy company is back with LiveStory, which adds vocal narration to a talking portrait.
As with Deep Nostalgia, where users could upload a still photo and turn it into a short animation using deep learning algorithms, Live Story is planning a similar feature. To do this, MyHeritage teamed up with Israeli company D-ID to have a talking portrait of a relative tell their life story.
How to revive a portrait of a dead person
Of course, the accompanying audio track won’t match the actual voice of your ancestor or relative, but the service offers over 140 voices in 31 languages to choose from. MyHeritage hopes to add custom voice samples as a feature sometime in the future.
Life events highlighted in the video bio can be automatically generated from information contained in the user’s family tree on MyHeritage, or from first-person text entered manually in brief sections called chapters, as well as additional images to help complete story.
The tool then stitches the images, converts the biography text to speech, and then uses video-visual reconstruction technology to create animation and lip-synching of the ancestor’s face and mouth to make the “talking head” story appear more realistic.
This part of the process can take anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes, depending on the length of the story.
LiveStory reportedly works just as well with black and white photos as it does with color or colorized photos, and the resulting video can be played as is or further edited and then shared with friends and family. It seems the future has already arrived.
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