AI versions of your favorite TV characters will be programmed to star in brand new episodes

The best television characters have already been immortalized on screen, given reruns and our ability to stream our favorite episodes on demand. Now early research at University of Leeds is attempting to give these characters new life, by building digital recreations that can appear in new episodes or even take over for Siri on your smartphone. The Leeds team is building a nearly-automated pipeline for capturing the digital essence of a TV character. A series of algorithms mutes the laugh track on a TV show, tracks the faces of each character, and analyzes their voices and body language, as well as the way their mouths move as they speak. The machine learning tool also scours the show's script in order to learn dialogue and understand how each character strings together sentences. TV is a natural fit for this kind of research, because there's so much video from which to learn.