Israel’s MyHeritage Partners With D-ID To Bring Photos To Life

Israeli genealogy platform, MyHeritage, teamed up with Israeli creative reality startup, D-ID, announced the release of MyHeritage’s latest feature, LiveStory, which animates the user’s ancestor telling his or her life story using D-ID’s patented AI and deep learning technology. 

MyHeritage licensed the technology to power the new feature from D-ID, a company founded in 2017 that animates still photographs and facilitates high-quality video productions using deep learning and AI-driven reenactment technology. 

The narrative integrated into LiveStory is automatically generated using family tree data stored on MyHeritage with text-to-speech technology combined with DI-D’s reenactment technology that animates the movement of a person’s face and mouth, producing a near realistic lip-sync. Curated or manually uploaded pictures from the family tree are used as a base template for animation and paired with the narrative. Once completed, the resulting short-form video can then be downloaded or shared online. 

LiveStory is a freemium feature on MyHeritage, available on desktop, mobile web, and the MyHeritage mobile app. Users can create several LiveStories for free with the option to create more pending a subscription. It is currently compatible with 31 languages, multiple dialects, and provides hundreds of voice male and female personas with which to choose.

“LiveStory takes storytelling to the next level,” said Gilad Japhet, founder, and CEO of MyHeritage. “With this latest viral feature, MyHeritage continues to lead the world of online family history in both vision and innovation. Our use of AI to breathe new life into historical photos is unique and is helping millions of people cultivate a renewed emotional connection with their ancestors and deceased loved ones. Genealogy is all about telling and preserving our family stories. We keep showing the world how fun and compelling genealogy can be.”

Founded in 2003, MyHeritage provides a platform for its 5.6 million users to discover and explore their respective family histories via DNA testing. In 2021, MyHeritage collaborated with D-ID to create a similar service to LiveStory called Deep Nostalgia, a popular tool that applied the same facial reenactment technology to historical pictures but without the audio component.  

“Following the dizzying success of Deep Nostalgia, we are thrilled to team up with MyHeritage once again to create another mind-blowing experience that will change the way people interact with family history,” said Gil Perry, co-founder, and CEO of D-ID. “LiveStory leverages AI-powered video reenactment to give voice to the stories of our ancestors. We are delighted by such a moving and inspiring application for our technology and our strong, ongoing partnership with MyHeritage.”