Now here's a thing. A piece of software that animates a still photograph; specifically a still photograph of your face. Rather than taking a video and playing it back on your PC, you can take just one facial shot and let CrazyTalk breathe life into it. The results may look more like a Disney animatronic sequence than an Alan Bennett Talking Head, but the potential is certainly there.

Anybody who has seen a recent feature film with 3D animation will understand the basics of this software. By attaching an invisible wireframe to the back of a portrait photo - head and shoulders - the face can be morphed to provide simple expression, head movement and speech. By adjusting the nodes in the wireframe to closely fit the outline of the head and important features such as eyebrows, eyes and lips, you can produce surprisingly natural basic movement.

This part is really quick and easy and you can go on to supplement the movements by adding expressions, such as anger or fear. These facial distortions are less successful, though some of the comic additions are quite fun: the program has a definite novelty value. You can mask out the background of your photo and add a background graphic of your own in a Max Headroom kind of way.

However, the real labour comes when you try to make the face respond to the spoken word. There are algorithms to make the mouth movements needed for various phonemes, though these are quite basic, if you leave it to the program's own automation.

Fortunately, you can go in via a video editor-style timeline and directly edit the lip-sync to more closely correspond to the spoken word. While this takes a bit of time, the results are much more natural. The examples provided with the program are not at all bad, though the subject matter of the text is all CrazyTalk hype.

You can load your own speech files in WAV format and get a CrazyTalk model to speak them or use Microsoft's Sam text-to-speech tool to create sub-Hawking speech from the text you type. The first method is definitely preferable.

So what to do with your talking head? Reallusion suggests adding it to a PowerPoint presentation (which is probably enough to provoke a written warning), using it as a Skype avatar (which is equally likely to lose you friends), or to send it as part of an electronic greetings card, presumably around Halloween. The program includes several greetings card and Microsoft Messenger templates to encourage you with this.

We're probably making fun at the expense of CrazyTalk, as it does show the potential for this kind of animated, talking head. The technology is workable and with some effort you can create a passable virtual character from a single, still photograph. As a tool for trying out the technique - and having a bit of fun - it's worth its asking price.