Sber, Russia’s oldest and biggest bank, is participating in Web Summit 2021, a major international technology conference that is taking place in Lisbon, Portugal. Today Sber presented the English version of its platform for generating video clips with photorealistic and animated characters, Visper.
Visper was first launched by SberDevices in April this year but was available only in Russian until now.
The platform is designed for creating visual content. It turns text into an animated video where a customized avatar reads the text. Visper can be used to make creative video clips without expensive, protracted filming, animate text content with the use of video, efficiently generate visual material for dynamic content (news, announcements), and personalize communication.
Video clips can be made with three realistic avatars (Elena, Pyotr, and Eva) and three animated avatars (Matilda, Vi, and Kira) whose appearances and clothes are customizable. You can even animate faces from your own photographs. The avatars have four female and two male voices for the Russian voice-over, and five female and male voices each for the English voice-over. Users can upload their own audio track, and the characters’ facial expressions will adapt to it. Users can also mark each avatar’s speech for intonation, incorporating pauses and emphasis, and add gestures, music, and a background. Videos can be based on presentations.
The characters can be used for marketing purposes, for online education, to create media content for entertainment or news as well as social media content, or to create animated characters for games. Turning a presentation into a video is a half-automated process which makes it simple and not requiring any technical skills.
Visper is equipped with 3D Face Animation SDK from Sber’s AR/VR Lab.
Users can create up to two minutes of video free each month. Both pay-per-minute and subscription rates are available. Businesses also have access to personalized rates depending on the nature of their operations.
David Rafalovsky, Sber Group CTO, said that seventeen thousand people currently use the service daily, creating videos starring Sber’s characters, each of whom is unique and suits different audiences and purposes. “An English-language interface was the next logical step in the project’s development. This will enable us to attract an international audience and introduce our designs to the world,” he added.
The English-language premiere means increasing the potential audience eight times – from 200 million to approximately 1.5 billion people worldwide.
You can have a look at how this works at https://visper.tech/en
Sber has been transforming into a tech company and last year the company dropped the word ‘bank’ from its former name Sberbank. Today Sber’s ecosystem encompasses various services from banking to taxi and food delivery, virtual assistants, smart home devices, cloud platforms, a supercomputer, driverless cars etc.
