Papagayo

Papagayo – Papagayo is an open-source lip-sync assistant tool that helps animators line up dialogue audio with the mouth movements of animated characters. Unlike fully automated AI solutions, Papagayo is semi-automatic and has been around for years, especially used with 2D animation programs like Moho/Anime Studio.

Animators load an audio file (voice recording) and the transcript into Papagayo. The tool then shows the text along a timeline and makes an initial guess at timing each word or syllable to the waveform of the audio.

Animators can fine-tune this by dragging word markers to sync perfectly with the spoken audio. Papagayo uses a predefined mouth shape chart (phonemes/visemes) – for example, shapes for sounds like “AI,” “O,” “M,” etc. Once the timing is set, Papagayo outputs a data file (or directly works with supported software) so that the character’s mouth in the animation will switch to the right shape at the right time, matching the dialogue. This saves animators from manually guessing and keyframing lip positions for every frame of speech. While Papagayo isn’t an AI-driven product, it’s a utility that significantly speeds up the traditionally tedious lip-sync process. It’s included here perhaps as a contrast or complement to the newer AI lip-sync tools: Papagayo represents the classic approach where animators are assisted but remain in control of syncing, as opposed to fully automatic deepfake-style syncing. In summary, Papagayo is a handy, lightweight tool that takes a spoken script and helps animators produce accurate mouth animations for character dialogue, making the task faster and more systematic.