FINAL ENTRY DEADLINE IS FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20TH ENTER NOW

The Webby Awards, TBWA\Chiat\Day, GIPHY, and One Pixel Off Team Up To Celebrate 22nd Annual Webby Award Winners With Voice-To-Gif

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact
Sunshine Sachs
webby@sunshinesachs.com
212-691-2800

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.

 

Find The Webby Awards Online:
Website: webbyawards.com
Facebook: Facebook.com/TheWebbyAwards
Twitter: @TheWebbyAwards
Instagram: @TheWebbyAwards
Snapchat: TheWebbyAwards
YouTube: youtube.com/webby

About The Webby Awards:
Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by The New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international awards organization honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, Film & Video, Advertising, Media & PR, Mobile Sites & Apps, Social, Podcasts & Digital Audio, and Games. Established in 1996, The Webby Awards received more than 13,000 entries from all 50 states and 70 countries worldwide this year. The Webby Awards is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS). Sponsors and Partners of The Webby Awards include: YouTube, HBO, WP Engine, EY, YouGov, Vitamin T, The Hollywood Reporter, WNYC Studios, Digiday, Glixel, Product Hunt, and Social Media Week.

About TBWAChiatDay:
TBWAChiatDay New York is part of TBWA Worldwide (http://www.tbwa.com), a top-ten ranked global advertising agency collective that uses Disruption® methodologies to develop business-changing ideas for brands. TBWA has 11,300 employees across 305 offices in 98 countries and also includes brands such as Auditoire, Digital Arts Network (DAN), eg+ worldwide, The Integer Group®, TBWAMedia Arts Lab and TBWAWorldHealth. TBWA’s global clients include adidas, Apple, Gatorade, Henkel, Hilton Hotels, McDonald’s, Michelin, Nissan, Pernod Ricard, Standard Chartered Bank, Singapore Airlines, and Sotheby’s. Follow TBWA on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and like us on Facebook.

About GIPHY:
GIPHY is GIFs. The first and largest GIF search engine, GIPHY is where thousands of artists, brands, and pop culture moments make today’s expression, entertainment, and info a little more moving. GIPHY serves more than five billion GIFs per day, seen by more than 300 million daily active users who watch more than eight million hours of GIFs ever day.

About One Pixel Off:
If it is a complicated digital project then our motto is “we do that.” Since 2007, One Pixel Off has been providing behind the scenes support to advertising agencies on technically complex digital projects. Our job is to make the process of executing these projects easy. We believe the less you worry about the tech, the more you can focus on what you do best. We are all over the map in terms of what we do. From full blown responsive CMS builds and web applications in the north. To remotely managed linux kiosks displaying animated 3D content in the west. Exploring AR and VR mobile apps in the east. Even venturing into custom-designed electronics tied to Raspberry PI or Arduino to support event activations in the south.

Drag