Rapport in 2024
A Year of Growth, Innovation, and Impact
A blog by Michael Berger and Gregor Hofer (CEO)
Co-founders of Rapport & Speech Graphics
As the festive season approaches, we’re proud to reflect on a year filled with groundbreaking innovation, creative partnerships, and transformative projects. We’ve continued to push the boundaries of real-time interactive characters, broken into new verticals, and secured international partnerships with big businesses and celebrities! With the launch of self-service, we’ve seen thousands of new users and have been excited to find out how they are bringing their projects to life. You can create a free account to try Rapport yourself here.
Below you can explore our highlights of the year and learn about some of our plans for 2025!
International Collaborations
Multilingual demo KDDI
We kicked off the year showcasing the multilingual capabilities of Rapport with a collaborative project with KDDI, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies. We built a real-time multilingual assistant that was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, helping conference goers with travel tips in Japanese, Spanish, and English. You can watch a video of the demo in action below.
Bobo the Gorilla
In one of our most exciting celebrity partnerships yet, we worked with 247 Comics to design and bring to life a digital collectible of the EVERMIND character Bobo the Gorilla. We worked with the EVERMIND creators, Hollywood actor Daniel Wu (Into the Badlands, West World) and artist Sean Chen (Iron Man, Wolverine), to create the first-ever real-time interactive comic book character. The digital collectible, made by our creative team, was distributed by Veve Digital Collectibles and sold 800 copies in a matter of minutes! Check out the story here and try Bobo on the 247 Comics website here.
DJ Jazzy Jeff
In another high-profile project, we worked with Grammy Award-winner DJ Jazzy Jeff to create, and bring to life, an AI-powered digital twin to interact with his fans and budding young music producers. It was revealed at SXSW in Texas where the real DJ Jazzy Jeff had a live conversation on stage with his digital avatar! You can read about that project here.
Build Your Own with Self-Service
Our mission at Rapport is to be the go-to digital avatar solution, and the launch of Rapport Self-Service in July was a big step in the right direction. Rapport Self-Service is a platform that allows anyone to create a free account and start building their own bespoke digital character experience.
Users can mix and match all the components needed, choose a character, select an AI to power it, give it a voice (in any language), animate the character, and then publish it with a line of code.
Since the successful launch on Product Hunt (where we ranked 4th in the world!), we have seen thousands of users sign up to start creating! You can try it yourself here.
Corporate Training and Immersive Learning
As well as making inroads in the entertainment and marketing sectors, we have seen some great solutions in the corporate training and simulations space as well as in education and immersive learning. It is in these sectors that we are finding our real-time interactive characters can enable meaningful conversations that add real value.
Realistic training simulations with Relativ.ai
Our partners at Relativ.ai are using Rapport to build realistic training simulations facilitating experiential learning and interactive experiences in a broad range of verticals including leadership development, sales, education, and HR.
Arjun Nagendran, Co-Founder of Relativ.ai, said: “Rapport is one of the only platforms that I've seen that effortlessly allows the integration of Generative AI capabilities in a rapid and scalable manner. In fact, the architecture is so intuitive that it barely requires any technical documentation.” Read the case study or listen to our podcast with Arjun.
Immersive learning experiences with Virti
Another of our partners, Virti, has been using Rapport to bring to life their Virtual Humans - making training more efficient, scalable, and engaging.
Nils Helberg, CTO at Virti said: “Rapport’s facial animation combined with its low latency and real-time responses helps us bring a new level of realism to our Virtual Humans creating truly immersive experiences.” Read the case study.
Expanding Character Possibilities
The Rapport platform works with almost any digital character; all we need is a properly rigged face. This year we’ve been experimenting with a host of hyper-realistic options for our Creator Tier. Currently on the Creator Tier, users have access to a range of MetaHumans, however, we have also teamed up with three different character creators to show proof of concepts.
We’ve worked with:
2DNAC to show how gaming companies can reuse their high-quality assets to interact with fans and communities. Read the case study and try the demo.
AvatarOS to bring to life a high-quality digital twin of their CEO, Isaac Bratzel. Try the demo or Listen to the podcast.
Copresence to enable anyone to create their own high-fidelity AI-powered digital twin using their smartphone. Listen to the podcast.
2DNAC
AvatarOS
Copresence
Building Rapport Podcast
This year, we have also launched the Building Rapport podcast to give a behind-the-scenes look at our projects and partnerships. Below you can listen to our first 7 episodes!
Continued Excellence - Speech Graphics
Speech Graphics, the company behind Rapport, has continued to thrive in 2024. At the start of the year, we won the Dragon Award for Pioneering Spirit at the China-Scotland Business Awards and in March we were named by the Financial Times as one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe!
However, it is not just our reputation that is growing but also our tech! At Speech Graphics, we have a mission to animate every sound that a human can make, and this year we have improved lip-sync and language capabilities, as well as added the animation of laughter, breathing, and other non-verbal sounds to make our audio-driven animation even more realistic. You can read a recap of Speech Graphics in 2024 here.
Summary and Plans for 2025
This year we have honed in on three main verticals where Rapport can provide value:
Corporate training and simulations. More.
Entertainment and marketing. More.
Education and immersive learning. More.
In 2025 we have many new projects in these areas and we will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible for real-time digital character experiences!
We look forward to sharing more with you next year!
- Gregor & Michael
