Cameo Hires Boss Baby’s Virtual Clone and Synthetic Alec Baldwin Voice to Record Personal Messages
Fans of The Boss Baby can now ask him for a personalized video on Cameo, courtesy of the character’s AI-powered digital clone. The first animated character to join the celebrity video message platform, Boss Baby’s movements and speech are synthetically generated by virtual human startup Hour One.
Virtual Boss Baby
The Boss Baby, star of two movies and a TV show, is already a 3D-animated character, but generating unique videos combines DreamWorks Animation’s custom-animation team and Hour One’s artificial video creation tech. The result mimics the look and sound of The Boss Baby, including the facial expressions, gestures, and synched lip movements. To simulate Alec Baldwin’s performance, Hour One teamed up with synthetic speech startup Lovo.
“We are thrilled to be working with both UFEG and Cameo, and to be demonstrating our video rendering cloud infrastructure combined with our AI technology to make an animated character accessible on Cameo for the first time,” Hour One CEO Oren Aharon said. “The Boss Baby is such a beloved character, so we are excited to bring him to life for fans.”
Cameo requests to the character can be for birthday messages, congratulations, and other greetings. The animated baby will use the names and other details provided to come up with the specific encouragement or teasing appropriate for the occasion. The video costs $20, relatively cheap compared to the many hundreds of dollars for a video from some of the biggest names on Cameo.
“This creative collaboration between Universal, DreamWorks Animation, Cameo and Hour One uniquely bridges together innovation, technology and DreamWorks’ prized franchise character, The Boss Baby, to deliver a standout, first-of-its-kind interactive fan opportunity,” UFEG president Abhijay Prakash said. “Delivering this enhanced, next-level opportunity to Cameo users paves the way for film and television audiences to uniquely connect with a DreamWorks property and effectively underscores Universal’s commitment in this rapidly-changing landscape to further evolve into a more holistic content and IP studio.”
Virtual Celebrities
The Boss Baby is joining a growing number of synthetic celebrities and brand faces. Technical improvements like those employed by Hour One and Lovo have accelerated the experiments, as did Unreal’s launch of MetaHuman Creator in February. Hour One worked with YouTube star Taryn Southern to make a virtual clone, as well as receptionists for guiding people around buildings. There’s also Nestle Toll House’s virtual human “cookie coach” Ruth and CoCo Hub’s artificial popstars. Just last week, StoryFile released a virtual version of William Shatner able to answer questions about his life story. And Cameo has plans to expand its virtual human stable, with The Boss Baby only the first of many animated celebrities coming to the platform.
“We’ve always believed in the ability to make impossible fan connections possible,” Cameo chief business officer Arthur Leopold said in a statement. “Now, in partnership with Universal/DreamWorks and Hour One, we’re enabling fans to connect directly with an AI-powered animated character for the first time ever to bring joy and humor into their lives. We believe this is the beginning of an entirely new frontier of fan engagement and IP monetization, and are thrilled to bring The Boss Baby onto Cameo to launch the future with us.”
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