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Overview

AI Talking Photo brings static photos to life by animating faces to speak with realistic lip-sync and natural facial movements. The API analyzes facial features and synchronizes mouth movements, head poses, and expressions with the audio file you provide. Processing: See recent typical API-job times. Jobs run asynchronously, and duration varies with the input, selected settings, and queue load.

How It Works

  1. Provide a photo - Upload an image with a clear face
  2. Add audio - Provide an audio file (required). To generate speech from text, create the audio first with the AI Voice Generator
  3. API animates - AI creates realistic lip-sync and facial movements
  4. Download video - Retrieve your animated talking photo

Use Cases

  • Marketing videos - Create spokesperson videos from headshots
  • Educational content - Animate historical figures or characters
  • Personalized messages - Send video messages from static photos
  • Social media - Create engaging content from profile pictures
  • Presentations - Add dynamic talking heads to slides

Best Practices

Photo Selection

Use clear, front-facing photos - Best results come from high-quality headshots with visible facial features.
  • Good lighting - Well-lit faces produce better animations
  • Front-facing angles - Avoid extreme profile shots
  • Clear features - Eyes, nose, and mouth should be unobstructed
  • High resolution - At least 512x512 pixels recommended

Audio Guidelines

Generation modes

Set style.generation_mode to realistic, the default, to preserve likeness, or prompted to guide the scene with style.prompt. The maximum selected audio duration is 300 seconds for realistic and 60 seconds for prompted. The older pro, standard, stable, and expressive values are deprecated. Use the current mode names for new integrations; style.intensity is also deprecated.

Code Examples

Basic Talking Photo

start_seconds and end_seconds are required — they control which segment of the audio is used. Video pricing is duration-based, so shorter segments cost less.

Pricing

Talking Photo pricing depends on generation mode and output duration, end_seconds minus start_seconds. See the per-mode credit rates. The create response reports estimated credits_charged; read the completed job for the final amount.

Resolution Limits

Set resolution to 480p or 720p, subject to your plan and generation mode. When neither resolution nor the legacy max_resolution is provided:
  • Prompted mode: defaults to 480p.
  • Realistic mode: maps your plan’s maximum output dimension to 480p below 1280px, or 720p at 1280px and above.
max_resolution is deprecated. Legacy requests still accept it as a larger-dimension cap, limited by your plan and mapped to the supported presets. An explicit resolution takes precedence. See Resolution Limits for plan guidance and the API reference for the current parameters.
Try this in our Google Colab Cookbook: Run this API with sample code. Just add your API key.

API Reference

AI Talking Photo API Reference

View full API specification

Lip Sync

Sync audio with existing video lip movements

AI Voice Generator

Generate speech audio for your talking photos