I brought my photo to life in 30 seconds. It started talking with intonation and gestures, I’m shocked!

In fact, I supposedly work on a neural network that can turn any photo into a short video clip similar to the “living” paintings in the Harry Potter universe. It seemed to me that it was unlikely that anything more amazing could be found.

But I was wrong. And now I will show you a real miracle that can test you in practice and delight you with the level of development of generative neural networks.

A free service where you can ask any person for free, say the text you need.

How it works

1. Follow this link to the HeyGen website

2. Click on the Add button and select a photo where the face is clearly visible

3. Then the service will ask you to register via Google mail and take a short survey of 6 points, such as how you are going to use this service and what field you work in. You can choose any answers, it does not affect anything.

4. Click Browse local files and select a voice audio file. You can take any fragment from the film, or record his speech on a dictaphone, up to 20 seconds long. You can use a fragment of a song – here everything depends on your imagination.

5. Click the Submit button and wait

The same in pictures:

Generation takes quite a long time: I had a 19-second audio/photo merge ready in 40 minutes. But it’s not worth the wait, believe me.

In general, this is how it works. The neural network itself will select facial expressions and emotions and bring the photo to life. This is how it looks.

Open the video in a new window and check it out with sound:

And here is my result. Look at the world through the eyes of a person, tell him your name on the other side of the screen and record a text voice.

I fed it to the HeyGen service and this is what it turned out to be (open video in new window to watch with sound):

This is simply some kind of outrageous level of artificial intelligence capabilities, which is available to everyone absolutely free of charge. True, there are some restrictions, such as a ban on the use of celebrity photos.

Well, sometimes you have to wait in line, so it’s best to test this service closer to night.

However, the wait is worth the result and you will have a practically “live” digital avatar of excellent quality.