- Jan 8, 2011
- 22,361
Today we are excited to announce Puppets, an exciting new feature for SwiftKey Beta allowing users to create their own virtual character that mimics their facial expressions and head movements. Android users can choose between five playful characters: Dinosaur, Panda, Cat, Owl and Dog to record a video with. Puppets can be shared widely and are not limited to any specific messaging app.
SwiftKey worked with the Microsoft Computer Vision and Microsoft Research Asia teams to bring Puppets to life. Unlike other facial tracking software, SwiftKey’s Puppets does not rely on users having a device with an inbuilt depth sensor in their camera and instead uses an RGB camera found in most Android smartphones.
Puppets’ AI technology has been trained using thousands of volunteers from around the world recording expressive videos of changing facial expressions. Using these images and recordings, SwiftKey has trained a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to learn how to identify facial movements and transfer these onto an expressive animal character.
Get app: SwiftKey Beta - Apps on Google Play