Speech animation is an extremely tedious task, where the animation artist must manually animate the face to match the spoken audio. The often prohibitive cost of speech animation has limited the types of animations that are feasible, including localization to different languages.

In this demo, we will showcase a new machine learning approach for automated speech animation. Given audio or phonetic input, our approach predicts the lower-face configurations of an animated character to match the input. In our demo, you can speak to our system, and our system will automatically animate an animated character to lip sync to your speech.

The technical details can be found in a recent KDD paper titled "A Decision Tree Framework for Spatiotemporal Sequence Prediction" by Taehwan Kim, Yisong Yue, Sarah Taylor, and Iain Matthews.