This program lets you pretend to be someone else on your video calls Avatarify

Customised video conferencing backgrounds have gotten an artificially intelligent upgrade: real-time animated deepfakes that transform your face into that of a celebrity.

Karim Iskakov at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow, and Ali Aliev, a software developer in Moscow, have developed a program that lets you create deepfakes in real time during video calls.

The program, called Avatarify, works with video conferencing applications such as Zoom or Skype. All it requires is a headshot of the person you want to appear to be.


Demonstrating to New Scientist via a Zoom call, Aliev used the program to appear to be speaking as several figures including Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Albert Einstein and the Mona Lisa.

The software uses an already existing AI algorithm that had been developed to create animated videos. The AI was trained on a dataset of 12,331 short videos of people’s faces, which had been sourced from interviews uploaded to YouTube.

The software almost instantly transfers a person’s facial expressions and the position of their facial features onto a given an image – a photograph of a celebrity or an artwork, for example.

The result is amusing if not entirely convincing: the deepfake obviously distorts if the person in the video moves their head too drastically, particularly if the background of the target image is patterned.

The developers see the software being used as a form of entertainment. “Your eyes are trained to detect discrepancies in the face,” says Iskakov.

The software only adjusts the video image, with no changes to a person’s voice. “I think it’s not possible to use it right now in some bad way to pretend to be someone else,” he adds.

Because of the processing-intensive task of running an AI, currently the software works best on computers with high processing power.