philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Character.AI Introduces New Video Generator in Closed Beta

Character.AI, a platform offering AI chatbots for socializing and role play, has released a video generation model called AvatarFX in closed beta. Promising the ability to make photorealistic images “come to life — speak, sing and emote — all with the click of a button,” the technology combines audio and video to create a variety of visual style and voice, from realistic 3D — including “non-human faces (like a favorite pet)” — to 2D animations, according to the company. AvatarFX also has the ability “to maintain strong temporal consistency with face, hand and body movement” and can “power videos with multiple speakers.” ...

Character.AI says its AvatarFX video will be watermarked so people know it’s not “real.” Additionally, it plans to block the generation of video featuring minors and will run images of recognizable people through a filter that changes details to obscure their identity, according to TechCrunch, which concludes that “since AvatarFX is not widely available yet, there is no way to verify how well these safeguards work.” ...

“The voices in these videos are generated by Character.AI’s own text-to-speech (TTS) technology, making conversations and singing sound natural and smooth,” writes Mint.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/character-ai-introduces-new-video-generator-in-closed-beta/