Speech Graphics Ltd

Speech Graphics Ltd

TalentScotland spoke to founder Dr Gregor Hofer, to ask about the company’s groundbreaking speech animation solution.

Tell me about the history of Speech Graphics

We incorporated at the end of 2010, but I’d worked alongside my co-founder Michael Berger for a long time, when we were both PhD students at the School of Informatics’ Centre for Speech Technology. We sat in the same office and were working on similar things - basically, audio driven animation.

What does your product do?

Modern video games typically feature a lot of speaking characters, whose faces need to be animated with a high degree of realism. Humans are very good a spotting even tiny flaws in facial movements during speech and find them quite disconcerting.

When people tackle this challenge, they usually do so from the animation or graphics side, using motion capture or even manual animation. Our background in speech technology allows us to do things differently. We understand how the face should deform during speech; we look at it from the inside, rather than the outside.

Combined with state-of-the-art speech recognition, this physical model lets us take an audio input – a line of game dialogue – and the software automatically produces a realistic facial animation which we send back to the game developer, ready to be used.

Any interesting developments in the pipeline?

We’re about to make our official launch, but obviously haven’t been completely hidden up to this point. We’ve had a lot of interest and some encouraging meetings with developers, but can’t really go into detail at this stage. Hopefully, you’ll start seeing games using our technology appear over the next couple of years.

At the moment we're really only offering a service. We use self-developed, in-house software to produce the animations, but we don't have a product for developers yet. We see that as the next step and something we'll look at moving into once the service is launched and we have a few clients under our belt.

How do you tend to recruit?

At the moment, Michael and I are the only full time employees. We tend to use a lot of contractors, because we often need very specific skills for particular tasks. For the same reason, we’re very open to taking on people from outside Scotland, if they have the skills and attributes we’re looking for.

For example, they have to have a good eye for animation. That's very important for quality - if something isn't deforming correctly, they have to be able to spot that and understand why.

Why did you choose to base yourselves in Scotland?

I'm from Austria myself and Michael is from the US, but we both started here. It's a good place and has a very active games community. There's a great pool of talent too. We wanted a graphics programmer and managed to hire someone from Realtime Worlds, who had a lot of experience and was just what we needed.

And why would the top international candidates want to work for you?

We produce something unique, which is the highest quality. In our field, we're absolutely the best, and if you're interested in this field, we're the company you would want to work for.

The only downside is that, because you’re looking at this stuff day after day, you find it very difficult to play games with bad lip-synching. I often end up just playing Super Mario!