Last week, Microsoft researchers detailed a new AI model they’ve developed that can take a still image of a face and an audio clip of someone speaking and automatically create a realistic looking video of that person speaking, reported CNN.

The video can leave people stunned as it is complete with lip-syncing and natural face and head movements.

In one demo video, researchers showed how they animated the Mona Lisa to recite a comedic rap by actor Anne Hathaway, the American news channel reported.

Speaking about outputs from AI model named VASA-1, Micorsoft said: "We introduce VASA, a framework for generating lifelike talking faces of virtual characters with appealing visual affective skills (VAS), given a single static image and a speech audio clip. Our premiere model, VASA-1, is capable of not only producing lip movements that are exquisitely synchronised with the audio, but also capturing a large spectrum of facial nuances and natural head motions that contribute to the perception of authenticity and liveliness."

"The core innovations include a holistic facial dynamics and head movement generation model that works in a face latent space, and the development of such an expressive and disentangled face latent space using videos. Through extensive experiments including evaluation on a set of new metrics, we show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods along various dimensions comprehensively. Our method not only delivers high video quality with realistic facial and head dynamics but also supports the online generation of 512x512 videos at up to 40 FPS with negligible starting latency. It paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviours" the website said.