TTS plugin Talking Head

The TTS plugin includes an experimental feature -- an animated "talking head" (aka personal assistant) that you can combine with the TTS.Speak action.

There are a few limitations. The first is that the talking head will only be animated when using TTS.Speak. It does not work with TTS.SpeakSync (or speak2wav) because SpeakSync essentially freezes the program until speaking is finished.

We may eventually find a workaround for this problem, but currently there are other development priorities so attending to this issue will depend not only on feasibility but also on user interest.

Actions

There are several TTS actions related to the talking head:

• TTS.ShowHead. Make the head appear and disappear (in its own pop-window).
• TTS.MoveHead. Re-size your talking head pop-up window as you like, and position it on the screen.
• TTS.SetOpacity. Set the opacity of the talking head form.
• TTS.SetTransRGB. Set the transparency of the talking head to a specific colour; any parts of your talking head images that match that colour will become transparent and show whatever is beneath the talking head form.

An early version of the VC talking head can be seen in the Philips Hue plugin video demo:

Make Your Own Talking Head

If you look in the plugin folder ..yourVcFolder\Plugins\TTS\visemes you will see all the still images used for the animation of the head when speaking. You can use the following link as a reference for the mouth positions

Visemes

Image 01 is the face at rest, Image 23 is the face when blinking. You can use any file names you want but they should be in the correct alphabetical order so be sure to use the same name for all files, and pad the numbers with a '0'

eg: file01.jpg, file02.jpg, file03.jpg

You can try to create your own images and place them in this "visemes" folder. We are hoping that if you come up with something good you will share it with the rest of us by posting a link to the files you have created.

You can use 3D software, photography, pull stills from video, illustration, clay scultpure, or just edit images in your favourite drawing program. Anything goes, just try to keep the main "head" in a still position to avoid jerking motions.