Joey from Friends is now 'virtually immortalized'

Researchers at the University of Leeds have now created a ‘virtually immortalized’ or rather, a digital version of Joey Tribbiani, a character from popular TV show Friends. They analyzed the body language, facial expressions and voice of the Joey and simply, created a chatbot.

The team of researchers aims to “immortalize popular characters” and give them a digital avatar. Similar to Siri and Alexa, you can have a simple conversation with the voice assistant. The team plans to expand the technique to other characters as well.

The team built a series of algorithms that can recognize individual characters, capturing their body language, facial expressions and voice. These tools analyze the show’s script and tries to understand how each character typically behaves and talks. It then builds a virtual talking avatar of the characters fully automatically from TV shows.

“We plan to improve the rendering of the avatar and extend our model to include interaction with real people and also between avatars,” said the team in a paper outlining the technique.

The team’s framework was demonstrated using all 236 episodes (97 hours of video) from the TV series Friends and explained how the tool generated novel sentences such as the evergreen “How YOU doin” catchphrase among others such as “Hey Ross do you want me to talk to some lady?” and “I like pizza with cheese”.

The end result? A ‘virtually immortalized’ Joey which will be capable of generating its own sentences in his own swanky style and voice, with a mouth moving to speak these words as well. Reportedly, the synthesized mouth that talks Joey will be layered over actor Matt LeBlanc, from the original footage of the show.