MyHeritage introduces animated family history videos from old photos

Genealogy site MyHeritage continues its foray into using digital technology to bring old photos to life with LiveStory, a continuation of its Deep Nostalgia offering. Like Deep Nostalgia, LiveStory animates still photos to animate photos but take the experience even further by adding narration by the animated face. The technology is licensed by MyHeritage from D-ID, a company specializing in video reenactment using deep learning, which was also behind Deep Nostalgia.

LiveStory takes the Deep Nostalgia concept further by adding audio. The narrative that describes a person’s life story, taken automatically from their MyHeritage family tree and enhanced by the user, is converted to high-quality audio using text-to-speech technology. (The user can choose from 140 voices in 31 languages). Reenactment technology then creates a high-resolution video animating the person’s face and mouth to speak the audio, by generating realistic lip-sync. The video below describes how the process works:

Here’s an example of LiveStory project: