ChatGPT, Midjourney, artificial intelligence programs are multiplying with increasingly astonishing results. Two Tiktok veterans are creating a tool that automatically translates a video into several languages, while respecting the intonation and movement of the speaker’s lips.
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Is the language barrier falling? Two Chinese people, who previously worked for TikTok, developed HeyGen, a video creation program capable of generating an avatar of a person. They have just added an automatic translation module and it has been a dazzling success.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU-i5NImcOo
In the video above, Lionel Messi at a press conference speaks in perfect English, which was surprising since he is known to only know how to speak one language: Spanish. Still, the lip sync is perfect. Even the tone and intonation are respected. The voice would be that of Messi, this is the ambition of this software: to be able to clone voices and even reproduce certain accents. But it’s not quite there yet.
Everyone knows the voice of General de Gaulle. Now it is possible to hear his speech translated into Italian. If there is a resemblance to General de Gaulle, the voice is not exactly the same. Same problem when the program translates a voice into French, it does so with a Quebec accent.
The result is not perfect, but it is sufficient for a corporate video or that of an internet influencer. This makes it very easy to broadcast your videos in several languages with perfect lip synchronization: the beginning of the end of subtitled videos on the internet.
Bad news for voice actors
Voice actors were the first (along with extras) to strike in Hollywood against artificial intelligence. Several films already use a more advanced version of this technology for dubbing in cinema without using actors.
But what worries you about the tools of HeyGen or Synthesia (which does almost the same thing), is their ease of use and the fact that they are capable of creating virtual characters that are larger than life, who can be made to say anything. Be wary of what you see on the internet… And what you hear!