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вЂњI canвЂ™t say that anyone today is making a living doing this,вЂќ she says. Monbiot wonвЂ™t say exactly how large these payments are except that itвЂ™s dollars, not cents. Liri, like everyone on Hour OneвЂ™s books, receives a micropayment every time a client licenses a video that uses her face.

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Hour One is working with Alice Receptionist to update its video footage of human actors so that the digital receptionists can be made to say different things in different languages without having to reshoot hours of video. вЂњA human being doesnвЂ™t need to waste their time filming.вЂќ Related StoryДЄnotherВ early example of the technology in action is Alice Receptionist, a company that provides firms with an avatar on a screen to handle visitorsвЂ™ queries, replacing the role of a human receptionist in a range of physical locations in the US. вЂњWeвЂ™re replacing the studio,вЂќ says Monbiot. WeвЂ™re talking about thousands of videos.вЂќД«erlitz now works with Hour One to generate hundreds of videos in minutes. They had to have production crews creating the same setup with the same actor over and over again, she says: вЂњThey found it really unsustainable. One major client is Berlitz, an international language school that provides teacher-led video courses for dozens of languages.ДЄccording to Monbiot, Berlitz wanted to increase the number of videos it offered but struggled to do so using real human actors. Hour One says it has more than 40 clients, including real estate, e-commerce, digital health, and entertainment firms. These voices are again fitted to the movements of the character in the video.

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Hour One also offers a premium service where the audio is recorded by professional voice actors.

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The quickest service uses text-to-speech software to generate synthetic voices, which are synced with the charactersвЂ™ mouth movements and facial expressions. They select a face, upload the text they want it to say, and get back a video of what looks like a real person delivering that script to a camera. Hour OneвЂ™s clients pay the company to use its characters in promotional or commercial video. The AI character that Hour One created using Liri's face Plugging the resulting data into AI software that works in a similar way to deepfake tech, Hour One can generate an endless amount of footage of that person saying whatever it wants, in any language. And thatвЂ™s it for the human part of the performance. To create a character, Hour One uses a high-resolution 4K camera to film a person talking and making different facial expressions in front of a green screen. (Currently, around 80% of its characters are under 50 years old, 70% are female, and 25% are white.) The company is aiming for a broad sample of characters that reflect the ages, genders, and racial backgrounds of people in the real world, says Monbiot. Like a modeling agency, Hour One filters through applicants, selecting those it wants on its books. вЂњWeвЂ™ve got a queue of people that are dying to become these characters,вЂќ says Natalie Monbiot, the companyвЂ™s head of strategy.ДЄnyone can apply to become a character. Hour One is building up a pool of what it calls вЂњcharacters.вЂќ It says it has around 100 on its books so far, with more being added each week. You just need to be willing to hand over the rights to your face. But Hour One doesnвЂ™t ask for any particular skills. Some have used professional actors to add life to deepfaked personas.

Hour One is not the only company taking deepfake tech mainstream, using it to produce mash-ups of real footage and AI-generated video. вЂњIt is definitely a bit strange to think that my face can appear in videos or ads for different companies,вЂќ she says. Liri does her waitressing and bar work in person, but she has little idea what her digital clones are up to. And it has big implications for the human workforce. It is part of a wave of companies overhauling the way digital content is produced. Liri can juggle so many jobs, in multiple countries, because she has hired out her face to Hour One, a startup that uses peopleвЂ™s likenesses to create AI-voiced characters that then appear in marketing and educational videos for organizations around the world.