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Is there a "talking head" library for Mac OS X / Cocoa / Objective-C? Specifically the ones that simplify translating spoken text into visemes / facial expressions? Microsoft has "Microsoft Agent" as part of their Text to Speech API, does the Mac has a worthy competitor for this feature?

adib
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    No, and (personally) I view this as a good thing – cobbal Nov 16 '09 at 05:07
  • There are plenty of uses for such a thing (as long as it's not forced down users' throats). I tend to be wary of any sentiment such as, "I don't like it, therefore it doesn't belong on the platform" ... there's plenty of room for imagination and the more tools we have, the better the platform can be. – Joshua Nozzi Nov 16 '09 at 15:44
  • Many thanks for your reply. I have just released my talking head app - http://NewsAnchorMac.com - it"s a feed reader that reads the news for you and frees your hand off the keyboard to do other tasks. – adib May 15 '10 at 03:16

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There is nothing to generate the face, but you can use the NSSpeechSynthesizerDelegate protocol to receive -speechSynthesizer:willSpeakPhoneme: messages so you can sync your own artwork with the speech.

I just posted a quick and dirty demo complete with project files and test mouth images. It's intended to show how easy this is to do. The hard part is the art work. :-) The project and blog post should be enough to get anybody started.

Joshua Nozzi
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