Speech Graphics & Rapport Are Bringing MetaHumans to Life With the Help of an Epic MegaGrant

Written By Ellen Grieve

Rapport, a real-time solution that animates faces from live audio, is pleased to announce that it has received an Epic MegaGrant from Epic Games. Rapport will use the support to enable real-time voice-driven animation within Unreal Engine using Epic’s MetaHumans, with believable facial expressions.

Rapport uses Speech Graphics technology to create a set of expressions and lip sync targets that are then triggered by a voice animation system. By integrating Rapport into Unreal Engine, we enable a usage-based license for the community of creators using MetaHumans. This will enable Unreal Engine creators to use Speech Graphics solutions for a variety of cases: 

  • Animate player voices in real-time inside Unreal Engine

  • Processing can be done on-device or in the cloud 

  • Run-time playback of SGX-generated facial animation - AAA quality for Indie studios and solo creators 

  • Enable fast Virtual Production using the Rapport real-time voice-to-facial animation engine 

  • Create AI-powered Virtual Beings easily with Rapport’s turnkey integrations with a leading chatbot, ASR, and TTS providers 

  • Detect emotional valence with Rapport Voice analytics and change facial expressions of character in real-time 

  • Augment and/or localize performance capture-based animations with SGX-generated speech animation 

Rapport & Speech Graphics is looking forward to sharing its progress on this project in the coming months. In the meantime, please check out our website to find out more about our projects: 

Rapport Website: https://www.rapport.cloud/  

Speech Graphics Website: https://www.speech-graphics.com/  

Media Contact: james.scott@speech-graphics.com / ellen.grieve@speech-graphics.com


Ellen Grieve
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