Look who's talking

Video cellphones allow you to see who you’re talking to, but the images take up a great deal of bandwidth. So instead of sending images, the Japanese consumer electronics company Panasonic in Osaka has patented a way to animate a computer-generated character to say the words a caller is speaking (EP 1326445). Software on the cellphone analyses an incoming voice call to determine the patterns of speech and the mouth movements that were necessary to create it. It then uses this data to control the lip movements of an animated character on the cellphone screen. The person receiving the call can choose from a library of…