I’ve met Nikhil Jain in the flesh, and now, on the laptop screen in front of me, I’m looking at a small animated version of him from the torso up, talking in the same tone and lilting accented English—only this version of Jain is bald (hair is tricky to animate convincingly), and his voice has a robotic sound.
For the past three years, Jain has been working on Oben, the startup he cofounded and leads. It’s building technology that uses a single image and an audio clip to automate the construction of what are sort of like digital souls: avatars that look and sound a lot like anyone, and can be made to speak or sing anything. -- More...
