Researchers develop method for real-time speech animation

Researchers at the University of East Anglia, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon University and Disney have created a way to animate speech in real-time. With their method, rather than having skilled animators manually match an animated character's mouth to recorded speech, new dialogue can be incorporated automatically in much less time with a lot less effort. To do this, the researchers recorded over eight hours of audio and video of a speaker reciting more than 2500 different sentences. The speaker's face was tracked as they spoke, which was used to create a reference face for an animation model. Off-the-shelf speech recognition software was then used to transcribe the speech sounds.