Researchers at Udacity develop AI that can generate lecture videos from audio narration

Producing content for Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms like Coursera and EdX might be academically rewarding (and potentially lucrative), but it's time-consuming -- particularly where videos are involved. Professional-level lecture clips require not only a veritable studio's worth of equipment, but significant resources to transfer, edit, and upload footage of each lesson. That's why research scientists formerly at Udacity, an online learning platform with over 150 courses, are investigating a machine learning framework that automatically generates lecture videos from audio narration alone. They claim in a preprint paper ("LumièreNet: Lecture Video Synthesis from Audio") on Arxiv.org that their AI system -- LumièreNet -- can synthesize footage of any length by directly mapping between audio and corresponding visuals. "In current video production pipeline, an AI machinery which semi (or fully) automates lecture video production at scale would be highly valuable to enable agile video content development (rather than reshooting each new video)," wrote the paper's coauthors.