GoAnimate, a popular video animation platform created in 2007 and renowned for its hand drawn animation video clips for explainer videos, was renamed a few years ago to Vyond and now it allows producers to create their own animated video in no time from imported text prompts. Vyond Go is an Artificial intelligence based feature of Vyond that automatically generates videos based on your own textual input: you can put in up to 4000 characters of text, you can choose some basic characteristics such as the “vibe” (sic) from formal to casual, the “format” (anecdote, debate, how to, tips…) and “lay out” (conversation or talking head). Vyond Go provides a serious of backgrounds from which to choose, like warehouse or park or university, a little bit limited choice but good for starters.
Asset types include characters, actions, templates, props, text boxes, music tracks, and sound effects. Editing can be done through a drag and drop interface that also allows you to create pans and zooms. You can also upload your own assets, such as audio files, image files, or video files. In the paid version, you can also use your own audio tracks, for example a voice over. Voices can be recorded directly or imported as an audio file. Characters automatically lip-sync with the audio (voice recording) that is assigned to them, or the voiceover can be used for narration. You can download the finished video as mp4 or animated GIF. Vyond Go is currently in Beta and allows users to generate only 3 videos every 24 hours. It claims to be the first animated video creation platform to do use AI in this way. We tested it with a few different complex texts, of about 3000 characters each. It turned out acceptable results in very short time: it took about slightly over one minute to create an animated video between 1 and 2 minutes each. Careful editing in the text can be necessary (luckily enough it is easy to in the edit mode). At a third attempt, the animated character started to make unnecessarily emotional facial expressions and gestures, so careful review will always be necessary, but fun it is!
