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THE WEBBYS, TBWAChiatDay, GIPHY, AND ONE PIXEL OFF TEAM UP TO CELEBRATE 22ND ANNUAL WEBBY AWARD WINNERS WITH VOICE-TO-GIFS
New Voice Recognition Platform Transforms Spoken Words into GIFs, Bringing Hallmark Webby 5-Word Speeches to Life at voicetogif.com
NEW YORK, May 1, 2018 – The Webby Awards, TBWAChiatDay New York, GIPHY, and One Pixel Off debuted Webby Voice-to-GIF today, a dynamic way to communicate on the Internet using a user’s own voice to create a series of personalized, animated GIFs. Webby Voice-to-GIF went live Monday at voicetogif.com, giving Internet fans everywhere an entertaining new platform to capture thoughts, emotions, and moments and a new way to talk on the Internet.
Celebrating this year’s Webby Award-winning work, Voice-to-GIF offers an added creative element for Webby Winners, translating their unique 5-Word Acceptance Speeches into custom-made animated GIFs. Webby tradition dictates that Winners adhere to a 5-Word Acceptance Speech Rule when accepting their Webby Awards, with memorable, GIF-worthy 5-Word Speeches from past shows like “Nude selfies ‘til I die” (Kim Kardashian West), “No, you are fake news” (BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith), “Women, look what we did” (The Women’s March), and “It’s pronounced ‘JIF’ not “GIF’” (GIF inventor Steve Wilhite).
Webby Winners and fans alike can use their own voices to create and share personalized GIFs selected from GIPHY’s voluminous archives. Explore Webby Voice-to-GIF at voicetogif.com.
“With so many extraordinary Winners this year in new categories across machine learning, artificial intelligence, and voice technology, we wanted to celebrate their achievements by creating an entirely new web experience that’s fun, creative, readily shareable, and highly addictive,” said Claire Graves, Executive Director of The Webby Awards. “Everyone loves a good GIF, so we’re excited to see how all the creators, makers, and GIF fanatics around the world embrace this entertaining new platform for self expression.”
“Our creative and technology teams wanted to develop a unique digital experience for The Webby Awards by taking a distinctly Webby moment and combining it with a highly prolific visual medium, activated by voice, said Alex Campbell, Associate Director of Interactive Production at TBWAChiatDay NY. “To push beyond early speech-to-GIF experiments, we looked to combine Google Cloud’s Speech Recognition API with semantic parsing and parts-of-speech tagging tools to create a web app with our partners at One Pixel Off that recognizes words in the context of their sentence (not just individually) in order to return more accurate and amusing results from GIPHY via their API. This is still experimental so we will be continuing to refine it the more people use it.”
Winners will be celebrated at a star-studded Awards Show hosted by comedian Amber Ruffin on Monday, May 14, 2018, at Cipriani Wall Street. Fans can watch the full Awards Show and all the show highlights, including special performances and hallmark 5-Word Speeches from the night’s big Winners, the next morning, on Tuesday, May 15 at webbyawards.com.