HomeWinBuzzer NewsMicrosoft Research Method Animates Faces to Speak Audio They Didn't Say

Microsoft Research Method Animates Faces to Speak Audio They Didn’t Say

Microsoft research's framework promises AI facial animation that supports a wider range of emotions and tones while dealing better with background noise.

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Faces are an incredibly complex combination of muscles, but AI and the methods behind it are becoming more and more capable. Following attempts by Samsung and Udacity to animate static images with AI, 's research team has detailed what it believes to be a superior method.

The paper outlines an approach that works despite background noise in the original recording and can work even if the speaker is emotional. Next to previous techniques, Microsoft's should be able to produce results that are less flat and more accurate.

To do so, the team proposes “an explicit audio representation learning framework that disentangles audio sequences into various factors such as phonetic content, emotional tone, background noise, and others”.

A More Versatile Solution

To prove its efficacy in all situations, the researchers replaced previous efforts with their framework. Importantly, publishers Gaurav Mittal and Baoyuan Wang say the approach will be important for real-world applications.

The AI was trained on three data sets, 1,000 CREMA-D recordings, 7,442 LRS3 clips, and 100,000 sentences from TED talks. They comprised of speakers from ethnically diverse backgrounds to ensure accuracy across several accents and cultures.

The paper did not include a full video but did include frames from several attempts. While they may not pass as human when applied to a high-quality, face-on source, they may appear accurate enough without close scrutiny.

This, of course, raises questions about the use of the tech in the future. With the rise of deep fakes and fake news, could such techniques be used in the future to create misleading content? Microsoft's general philosophy is to restrict the use of some AI tech to non-nefarious means, but such techniques can also create a power imbalance. It's a difficult line to draw, but we may see these methods used in Azure solutions in the future.

SourceMicrosoft
Ryan Maskell
Ryan Maskellhttps://ryanmaskell.co.uk
Ryan has had a passion for gaming and technology since early childhood. Fusing the skills from his Creative Writing and Publishing degree with profound technical knowledge, he enjoys covering news about Microsoft. As an avid writer, he is also working on his debut novel.

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