Tony is a Geek

How technology has moved on (as it should) since 2017, which was when I was looking into using 3D human virtual avatars .  Back then it was EXPENSIVE and I mean expensive. Today, however, (as it should) it has dropped to an acceptable pricing. This company, based in London, UK, has a wonderful offering: https://www.synthesia.io/ https://www.synthesia.io/ The Personal pricing is shown below: What does a video credit mean? Well, 1 video credit = 1 minute of video.  So, for $30 per month you get 10 minutes of video per month.  10 minutes is actually quite a long period of time. Maybe it's time to make 1 minute videos using the Text to Video feature, so instead of writing text like I am doing now, I can still write the text; but feed it into SYNTHESIA and it will make an Avatar speaking the words in a video.  Okay, it's not rocket-science, but it is a novel approach that is way way way cheaper than the offerings I was looking at 5 years ago ( https://www.soulmachines.com...

As you know, I've been a bit of a fanboi over the past year for all things to do with Virtual / Digital Humans ( Avatars - yes, I said that word ) UBS has teamed up with IBM and avatar biometrics outfit FaceMe to build two "animated digital assistants", which will now be tested over three months. CHECK OUT the original article here: https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/32350/ubs-puts-digital-clone-of-chief-investment-officer-in-branch What is of more interest to me is what technology is being used to make/render the Digital Humans. Enter (another) New Zealand based Digital company - ( it makes you wonder if all these companies originally did work on Lord Of the Rings or other similar movies and are now switching all that knowledge to this area? just a theory ) Anyway, here's another quick video showing the general offering from the FaceMe company .

Totally, 100% selfish plug :-) https://developer.ibm.com/recipes/tutorials/create-a-3d-digital-human-with-ibm-watson-assistant-and-unity3d Have you ever thought to yourself: y'know, I want my own HOLLY ( from Red Dwarf ) I have "skills"..... I'm a computer software developer..... I have "stuff" on my laptop that I've installed / used a few times, but forgotten what it was for again.... .....and you have a spare 30-40 minutes?  (and $35) Then look no further, welcome to the world of Unity, UMA2, SALSA, IBM Watson SDK and the IBM Watson Assistant API service! I wrote an article that may be useful to follow if you want to do the above sort of thing on a rainy Saturday morning.... https://developer.ibm.com/recipes/tutorials/create-a-3d-digital-human-with-ibm-watson-assistant-and-unity3d (and yes, I know the TTS is not that accurate, I didn't give it much/if any training, so I'm surprised it did as well as it did!) ...