By Rosemary Collins

Published: Friday, 04 March 2022 at 12:00 am


Family history website MyHeritage has unveiled LiveStory, a new feature that uses AI to let the people in old photographs move and speak.

LiveStory was developed with company D-ID and follows MyHeritage’s launch in 2021 of Deep Nostalgia, a tool that animates old photographs to make them move.

To use LiveStory, you will need to be a MyHeritage subscriber or register for a free account.

When you upload your photograph, MyHeritage will begin by using photo enhancement tools on the image, then ask you to enter the gender and name of the person in the photograph.

You are then asked to write the person’s LiveStory in the box provided, and select a voice from different ‘Voice options’, based on the person’s gender and nationality. For example, there are four options for a woman speaking ‘English (U.K.)’.

"Screenshot

LiveStory will convert the writing to audio using text-to-speech technology, and create a video animating the person’s face and mouth to speak.

If you already have a family tree on MyHeritage, the website can create an automatic LiveStory using information and photographs from your tree. You can also edit and customise the video before sharing it.

A gallery on the MyHeritage website features LiveStory videos of famous historical figures including entertainer and French Resistance agent Josephine Baker, investigative journalist Nellie Bly and escapologist Harry Houdini.

To address concerns about LiveStory being used to create ‘deep fakes’ (fake videos of real people created using artificial intelligence), users are asked to only use the technology on photographs of deceased individuals, not use it on a photograph of a living person without their permission, and not use it to create content that is obscene, false or offensive.

Family historians on Twitter disagreed in their reaction to LiveStory, with some admiring the technology and others calling it “creepy”.

Have to say, loving all of the tech news (my favourite!) that’s coming in. This time it’s from @MyHeritage announcing “LiveStory” (it’s exactly as it sounds) – a follow up on Deep Nostalgia that was announced at last year’s RootsTech. What do you think? https://t.co/iAiPhCNGrY

— Daniel Loftus is helping to make #GenealogyForAll (@DanielGenealogy) March 3, 2022