Hello, viewers! I've been sharing audio online for years, but just discovered an amusing way to generate a talking-head video. At Gizmoz.com, you upload a photo and record a sound bite, and the service converts them into an animated 3D face:
I used my basic USB headset mic to record the audio above. First I had to right-click the screen and give Flash access to the mic. I also noticed that the program clipped the beginning of the phrase, so I redid it with a quick tongue clack before speaking to fool the recorder.
Here's a clip using different visual accessories and Gizmoz's text-to-speech option:
I wish it were possible to upload audio; as you heard, the text-to-speech synthesizer is not very good at detecting context. Here's what I entered: "Hello again. David Battino here. This time I'm using Gizmo's text to speech audio-input option. Let's try a phonetic spelling. Bat tee no."
So what use is a talking head? You could use it to enliven (or stupefy) presentations or Skype sessions, create blog avatars, and more. The site offers an "answering machine" module that could make it more fun for your site visitors to leave comments. However, commercial use requires a license.
Having recently written an article on audio embedding, another interesting thing I noticed was the embedding code the site generates. Instead of the messy nested object and embed tags, it uses <embed> only:
<embed src='http://www.gizmoz.com//newsite/swf/newFlvViewer2.swf' flashvars='itemId=704730&ownerId=111974&typeId=egvc&baseDomain=http://www.gizmoz.com/' quality='high' bgcolor='#ffffff' width='410' height='340' name='GizmozFlvViewer' align='middle' allowfapiAccess='sameDomain' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' pluginspage='http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer' wmode='transparent'></embed>(via Larry Magid)
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