wish the avatar to resemble

One of the more unexpected products to launch out of the Microsoft Ignite 2023 event is a tool that can create a photorealistic avatar of a person and animate that avatar saying things that the person didn’t necessarily say.

Called Azure AI Speech text to speech avatar, the new feature, available in public preview as of today, lets users generate videos of an avatar speaking by uploading images of a person they wish the avatar to resemble and writing a script.

Microsoft’s tool trains a model to drive the animation, while a separate text-to-speech model — either prebuilt or trained on the person’s voice — “reads” the script aloud.