Innovation Insights
by Stephen Shapiro

digital me

My Digital Avatar

It’s amazing what AI can do – and quickly.

I uploaded about twenty still pictures to HeyGen. The time-consuming part was finding recent pictures that were clear enough to be used.

I uploaded my PIVOTAL audiobook that I recorded in a studio to ElevenLabs. That took minutes.

I then typed in the script, pressed a button, and out popped this video.

The video could be better if I trained it with movies rather than still photos. But this was an experiment.

The audio is mind-blowingly good.

You can also automate a connection to ChatGPT with a little work.

Imagine typing a prompt into ChatGPT, pressing a button, and out the other side is a video of you.

As cool as this is, I would rather create “real” videos. Using a digital avatar doesn’t feel authentic and doesn’t give clients the right perspective on how I speak.

This could be a great option if I needed to create a large volume of videos or if I wanted to test out scripts for videos before recording them. It’s a nice way to experiment before going into the studio.

This technology has many valuable use cases. The key is not to use it simply because it is new and different but because it solves a problem.