MyHeritage has launched an new feature, called ‘LiveStory’, that allows you to create animated videos of your ancestors telling their life story, using just a still photo and some text. This exciting new tool gives you a whole new way to document, preserve and share your most treasured family stories.

The name LiveStory comes from “live life story”. A LiveStory is a video biography, where the narrative is told by a speaking portrait of your ancestor or relative, based on details from your family tree and manually entered text, and is enriched by photographs that illustrate various life events.

Learn more about LiveStory in this short video:

 

Imagine watching a realistic simulation of how your grandfather may have looked and sounded telling the story of his life, his immigration to the United States, and how he fell in love with your grandmother. How emotional and exciting that would be, to say the least! Well, that’s exactly what you can do with LiveStory, as in the example below:

All you need is a clear photo of the individual and a simple narrative written in the first person to create your own LiveStory in just minutes! If you already have a family tree on MyHeritage, we can create an automatic LiveStory for you using information and photos from your tree. You can then edit the narrative and add photographs, customize the voice, and preview the result as much as you like until your LiveStory is ready to share with your family and friends.

LiveStory will make your ancestors’ stories come alive. It can be a deeply moving experience to hear your relatives reminisce about the past and take you along for the journey. This unique technology is sure to engage and excite your entire family!

 

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How it works

LiveStory is powered by some of the most advanced AI technologies available today. The innovative technology for the speaking portrait was licensed by MyHeritage from D-ID, a company specializing in video reenactment using deep learning.

Our first license and integration of D-ID’s impressive technology resulted in Deep Nostalgia™, which allows users to animate the faces in historical photos. This feature took the internet by storm and was used nearly 100 million times in the first year since its launch.

LiveStory takes this concept even further by adding audio. The narrative that describes a person’s life story, taken automatically from their MyHeritage family tree and enhanced by the user, is converted to high-quality audio using text-to-speech technology. Cutting-edge reenactment technology then creates a high-resolution video animating the person’s face and mouth to speak the audio, by generating realistic lip-sync. The gestures in the driver videos that are used to create the animation sequences are real human gestures. However, the end result is not authentic, but rather a technological simulation of how the person in your photo would have moved and looked if they were captured on video and spoke the words that you provided.

LiveStory works equally well on black and white photos and photos that were originally taken in color. It also works well on colorized photos and photos whose colors were restored using MyHeritage In Color™. In fact, combining these features can lead to great results. MyHeritage now makes it possible for you to take a blurry black and white photo, repair it, colorize it, enhance its focus, and then use it to create a LiveStory.

LiveStory combines some of the most impressive AI technologies available today, bringing your family stories to life like nothing you’ve ever seen! And remember, you can create a video biography using LiveStory for people who lived before video was even invented!

You can easily create a LiveStory from scratch. To do so, visit the LiveStory web page: www.myheritage.com/livestory

View More Examples of LiveStory Videos Below