SYNCHRONIZING THE MOVEABLE MOUTHS OF ANIMATED CHARACTERS WITH RECORDED SPEECH

The animation of a speaking character is synchronized with recorded speech by creating and playing a linguistically enhanced sound file. A sound editing tool employs a speech recognition engine to create the linguistically enhanced sound file from recorded speech and a text of the speech. The speech recognition engine provides timing information related to word breaks and phonemes that is used by the sound editing tool to annotate the speech sound data when creating the linguistically enhanced sound file. When the linguistically enhanced sound file is played to produce sound output, the timing information is retrieved to control the animated character's mouth movement and word pacing in the character's word balloon. The sound editing tool additionally provides editing functions for manipulating the timing information. A text to speech engine can use the same programming interface as the linguistically enhanced sound file player to send notifications to the animation, providing prototyping without recorded speech. Since both use the same interface, recorded speech can be incorporated at a later time with minimal modifications.