We are naturally more fluid and relaxed when communicating with people with the same culture and background. There are styles of speech, body language, gestures, paralinguistic features, appearance cues, and shared knowledge that we implicitly understand. We know who we are talking to, which is missing when we talk across cultures.
Culturally Yours creates a de novo video avatar that bridges the gap from one culture to another. Translation operates at a level of meaning above the literal — the intersection of words with conversational styles. As this work proceeds, we expect an important outcome to be a greater understanding of cross-cultural communication and styles of human expression.
Watch the video of Andy Lippman generated from an image using Culturally Yours here .