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Gregor has a wealth of industry knowledge as well as a strong academic background, holding a PhD in informatics from the University of Edinburgh. He was a senior researcher at the Telecommunications Research Centre in Vienna and a research fellow at the School of Informatics before co-founding Speech Graphics. It was then that he invented text-to-speech artificial intelligence and commercialised a prototype that is currently utilised on official websites. Additionally, he co-wrote grants totaling £1.5 million to help commercialise technology.
 
Gregor co-founded Speech Graphics with Michael Berger and gaming industry veteran Colin Macdonald in 2010 to commercialize voice-activated facial animation. Since then, the group has won numerous honours, such as the John Logie Baird Award for innovation and the 2015 TIGA Award for Best Animation Supplier. As an extension of  Speech Graphics Gregor founded Rapport in 2022, with the goal of specialising in emotionally intelligent virtual interactive personas.
 
Based on over 20 years of research in computer graphics, biomechanics, psychology, linguistics, and machine learning, Rapport employs audio-driven facial animation technology. With the goal of fostering more organic connections between humans and machines, the real-time platform assists customers in converting material into compelling conversions. 
 
In addition to his full-time role at Speech Graphics and Rapport, Gregor is also Supervisory Board member at System Industrie Electronic Holding AG.
Presentation title: 
Rapport: Towards Mass Adoption of AI-driven Avatars
Presentation description: 
In this presentation, we will present the Rapport platform as well as example use cases in training/education and marketing. With the rapid adoption of LLM based dialogue solutions, many companies are exploring the use of Ai-driven avatars to create engaging experiences for example in training and education but also as brand ambassadors or virtual influencers. To build a successful experience utilising avatars and AI, latency is a major issue that must be overcome. It is not trivial to integrate the many different technologies that have to work together seamlessly, including rendering, networking, TTS, and ASR. All of these technologies create their own latency and there are strategies such as using gestures or fillers to bridge certain delays. Speech Graphics award winning voice-driven animation technology is the standard solution for AAA video game companies. It has now released the Rapport platform that integrates all the required voice and AI services from many different vendors, including OpenAI, Google, ElevenLabs, Groq, and many others together with avatar creation and animation. It allows users to connect the different technologies with minimal latency and incorporate filler strategies with no need to code.