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Leary can combine so many jobs in different countries because she hired her face at Hour One, a startup that uses human imagery to create AI-voiced characters that then appear in marketing and educational videos for organizations around the world. They are part of a wave of companies redefining how digital content is produced. And this is of great importance for human resources.

Leary serves the waitress and works in the bar in person, but knows little about what her digital clones are up to. “It’s definitely a little weird to think that my face can appear in videos or advertisements for different companies,” she says.

Hour One isn’t the only company to make extensive use of Deepfake technology to create hybrid footage from real footage and AI video. Some have used professional actors to bring fake characters to life. But Hour One doesn’t require any special skills. You just need to be ready to transfer the rights to your person.

Driven by character

Hour One creates a pool of what he calls “characters”. He says he currently has around 100 on his balance sheet, with more being added every week. “We have a line of people who are dying to become these characters,” says Natalie Monbiot, head of strategy at the company.

Anyone can apply to become a character. Like a modeling agency, Hour One filters candidates by selecting those it wants from its books. According to Monbiot, the company aims to create a wide variety of characters that reflect the age, gender and race of people in the real world. (Currently, about 80% of his characters are under 50, 70% are women and 25% are white.)

To create the character, Hour One uses a high-resolution 4K camera to capture a person talking and making different facial expressions in front of a green screen. And that’s all about the human part of the performance. By inserting the received data into artificial intelligence software that works in a similar way to deepfake technology, Hour One can generate an endless number of videos in which this person says whatever he wants, in any language.

Hour One customers pay the company to use its characters in advertising or commercial videos. They pick a face, upload the text they want to say, and return a video of what looks like a real person delivering that script to the camera. The fastest service uses text-to-speech software to generate synthetic voices that sync with the lip movements and facial expressions of the characters. Hour One also offers a premium service in which sound is recorded by professional voice actors. These voices again match the movements of the character in the video. Hour One says it has over 40 clients including real estate, e-commerce, digital health and entertainment companies. One of the main clients is Berlitz, an international language school that offers teacher-led video courses in dozens of languages.

Berlitz wanted to increase the number of videos on offer, but he struggled to do so using real people, Monbiot said. The crews had to create the same productions with the same actor over and over, she said: “They found it really unsustainable. We’re talking thousands of videos. “

Berlitz now collaborates with Hour One to create hundreds of videos in minutes. “We’re replacing the studio,” says Monbiot. “A person does not need to waste time filming.”