With more people than ever using zoom to work from home, users are finding new ways to spice up endless remote meetings and group hangs by looping videos of themselves looking engaged, adding wacky backgrounds, and now, using deepfake filters for impersonating celebrities when you’re tired of your own face staring back at you in the front-facing camera window.
Is this an inbuilt feature or a different software?
Avatarify is a program that superimposes someone else’s face onto yours in real-time, during video meetings. The code is available on Github for anyone to use. With other face-swap technologies, like deepfakes, the algorithm is trained on the face you want to swap, usually requiring several images of the person’s face you’re trying to animate. This model can do it in real-time, by training the algorithm on similar categories of the target (like faces).
Is it available for everyone to use?
Motherboard tested Avatarify, which is available open-source on Github, and found that while the code itself is accessible, it still requires a bit of programming knowledge and some decent hardware to run the app. You have to run Zoom or Skype, as well as streaming software and Avatarify at the same time, which takes a decent amount of computing power.