Born on St Patrick's Day: Happy 115th Mary

They say that its good luck to be Irish, and that the luckiest of all are those who are born on St Patrick's Day. No doubt this is what was said the day that my great grandmother was born. However, her life was not necessarily filled with the good luck that the superstition had predicted. As much as she had a hard life, her life was also an "ordinary" one of a young British immigrant to Canada. Despite that, the simple life she led in youth was filled with fun. She embrace the changing times, new found freedoms, and innovations. Its the heirlooms from that chapter of her life that fascinate me the most because they show aside to her that none of my relatives knew - a woman who was happy. So today, I am going to share the side of her that one of those heirlooms tells. I have a small black autograph book that was hers.  At almost 100 years old, the book binding has all but disintegrated yet the leather cover is in near pristine condition and the partially bound pages are al
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Conversations from the Grave?: My first time using MyHeritage DeepStory

I've heard lots if interesting things about MyHeritage's new AI technology and figured I would try it out to see if it could live up to all the hype. 

How does it work?

1. Choose a picture

I chose to use the highest quality head-on image in my digital collections, which happened to be of my 2x great grandfather Herbert Morris Proctor.  I have not colourized the picture so I just used it in the original sepia tones because why not? The video did automatically crop to focus on his face so if you are using a full body shot (like the one below), I'd recommend using a higher quality image. It does slightly enhance and restore the image however that is often not enough to compensate for a blurriness or graininess. 

2. Enter their name

I entered his full given name in the first name box.

3. Start writing out the events of their life 

There are a number of things that I enjoy about the life story builder. First off, it is very customizable. You have the options to write whatever you want and can add pictures along the way. I chose not to add pictures to my story as I did not have many of which were well suited to the events I was choosing to discuss.

As you add chapters, MyHeritage starts each of them off with a prompt and provides a suggestion of what type of information you should include. The prompt is completely editable so if you dont like the wording? no problem - just start backspacing! 

As your writing out the chapters, it helps to individually play back each section. One of the challenges of the current AI technology is that the voice has a slightly unnatural speech pattern and therefore does not read with the same cadence that an actual human voice would. Playing the section back allows you to add, remove, or adjust the punctuation until you obtain the desire effect. 

4. Select a voice

I know that Herbert was born in England (specifically Lancashire) so I wanted the voice to reflect that as much as possible. I chose to used the "Andrew (UK)" voice as it sounded more working class than the other option. The majority of the voices are for American accents. Aside from that there are a handful of options for Irish, English, Australian, and South African accents. There are also a few voices for children, however none of them are for accents

So far the quality and selection of the AI voices is the only thing that I was underwhelmed by. Quite a few of them sound like robots. Of the ones which have accents, many of them dont sound accurate or are inconsistent to the point that the accent sometimes disappears completely. 

Note that you can adjust the speed of the voice if you dont feel that its default pace suits your ancestor. If you do choose to do this, Id strongly recommend playing the individual sections back just to make sure that the voice doesnt go too fast when it speeds up. (It is designed to have periods where it reads back slightly faster the set speed during the audio tester). 

5. View your results

Here are the results of my story for Herbert! 


There was a slight animation error with the image where part of the chair was accidentally identified as part of his head. There were other abnormal/minor errors such as the position of the teeth relative to the mouth and the slightly abnormal/intense facial movements. I have constructed two DeepStories so far and the most significant inconsistency I noticed was with the teeth/mouth.  When the image (of a different ancestor) was animated, the technology gave him horse like teeth which I know for a fact to be inaccurate. 

Left is before enhancement, and right is after enhancement

Overall, I was impressed by the technology and would love to try it out with a few other of my ancestor's pictures. 


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How to Write an Ancestor's Life Story

MyHeritage in Colour

Colourizing Black and White Pictures: Is MyHeritage In Colour Worth the Subscription?

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