Talking head library for Mac OS X

Question

Is there a "talking head" library for Mac OS X / Cocoa / Objective-C? Specifically the ones that simplify translating spoken text into visemes / facial expressions? Microsoft has "Microsoft Agent" as part of their Text to Speech API, does the Mac has a worthy competitor for this feature?

Answer 1

There is nothing to generate the face, but you can use the NSSpeechSynthesizerDelegate protocol to receive -speechSynthesizer:willSpeakPhoneme: messages so you can sync your own artwork with the speech.

I just posted a quick and dirty demo complete with project files and test mouth images. It's intended to show how easy this is to do. The hard part is the art work. :-) The project and blog post should be enough to get anybody started.