Researchers resurrected Joey from Friends as a video chatbot

Could this be any more disturbing? A dozen years after they went off the air, the cast of Friends has been virtually reunited for a project that turned one of them into a video chatbot. As spotted by Prosthetic Knowledge, researchers at the University of Leeds used machine learning to create automated video avatars that speak in the voices of their characters. The result is a system that uses the original performances recorded by the actors to generate brief new scenes, starting with Matt LeBlanc's immortal Joey Tribbiani. The system was demonstrated this weekend at a European Conference on Computer Vision workshop.