Phonemes are the smallest structural units of sound that distinguish meaning for a language, such as "oo, ee, ar, m, b, p," etc. in English. Face Robot recognizes phonemes based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) standard: 38 phonemes for US English and 23 phonemes for Japanese. You'll notice in the charts below that the languages share many of the same phonemes.
Face Robot automatically maps the set of phonemes to the matching spikes in the audio file when you generate the lip-sync animation.
Phonemes are sounds, but what matters the most in animation is what you can see: that's where visemes come in. A viseme is the way that the mouth is shaped to represent a specific phoneme—essentially, it's a visual phoneme.
Face Robot provides you with a library of viseme poses that are mapped to the animation controls on the character's mouth.
The following charts show the IPA phonetic symbol, the Unicode value, and an example word in which the phoneme would be used for English and Japanese:
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