Sunday, February 03, 2013, 03:49 am

Briefly: CrazyTalk 7 app uses audio and text to automatically animate faces

By Kevin Bostic

Like the others, I was drawn by the visual of a Pembroke Welsh Corgi on the screen, its jaw moving in time with pre-recorded speech, welcoming me to the CrazyTalk booth at Macworld.


CrazyTalk 7 is an animation software offering from Reallusion that allows users to easily map pictures to a wireframe model of a face. From there, it's a few easily tweaked steps to animate whatever is in the picture, with the program syncing movements to whatever audio the user records or imports.

The software is impressive to see in action, as it takes static photos and — with the aid of the wireframe — makes them move convincingly, stretching and shrinking appropriate sections in order to make the motion look more natural.


There are quite a few kids walking the Macworld floor with their parents, and CrazyTalk held the attention of lots of them, as well as many adults.