Magpie Pro Feature Tour: 6. Speech recognition

Magpie Pro 2.0 features two completely new speech recognition engines, and also allows third parties to integrate their own speech recognition programs using a plug-in architecture.

The Phonetic Alignment speech recognition engine offers high quality recognition for 2d and 3d actors, requiring eight poses for the basic mouth positions and a transcript of the dialogue track. The transcript text is converted into a sequence of phonemes that are then aligned with the waveform using advanced pattern matching and probabilistic techniques. This recognizer is language dependent, and it currently supports English, Spanish, Portuguese and French.

Figure 6.1 - A 3d animation rendered directly from Magpie Pro. The mouth animation was automatically generated using the Phonetic Alignment recognizer. The eye and eyebrow animation was created manually. The head model was generated by FaceGen Modeler and then imported into Magpie Pro as an actor. Click on the image above to watch the clip.

Figure 6.2 - A 2d animation automatically generated using the Phonetic Alignment recognizer. Click on the image above to watch the clip.

In addition to assigning keyframes, the Phonetic Alignment recognizer can return word or phoneme information back to the project and store them as selections or comments.

Figure 6.3 - A section of the Timeline pane showing the waveform, a few word selections and phoneme comments all automatically set by the Phoneme Alignment recognizer.

The Amplitude speech recognition engine is a very simple, language independent engine that can be used to quickly animate a 3d actor's mouth synchronized with the audio track. This recognizer requires an actor with just one pose that represents the mouth fully opened and will analyze the amplitude of the waveform at each frame to control the weight of the pose.

Figure 6.4 - A 3d actor animation automatically generated using the Amplitude recognizer. Click on the image above to watch the clip.

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