Gregor Hofer, CEO & co-founder of Rapport

Gregor Hofer

CEO & co-founder of Rapport, Rapport

Gregor has a wealth of industry knowledge as well as a strong academic background, holding a PhD in informatics from the University of Edinburgh. He was a senior researcher at the Telecommunications Research Centre in Vienna and a research fellow at the School of Informatics before co-founding Speech Graphics. It was then that he invented text-to-speech artificial intelligence and commercialized a prototype that is currently utilized on official websites. Additionally, he co-wrote grants totaling £1.5 million to help commercialize technology.

Gregor co-founded Speech Graphics with Michael Berger and gaming industry veteran Colin Macdonald in 2010 to commercialize voice-activated facial animation. Since then, the group has won numerous honors, such as the John Logie Baird Award for innovation and the 2015 TIGA Award for Best Animation Supplier. As an extension of Speech Graphics Gregor founded Rapport in 2022, to specialize in emotionally intelligent virtual interactive personas. 

Based on over 20 years of research in computer graphics, biomechanics, psychology, linguistics and machine learning, Rapport employs audio-driven facial animation technology. To foster more organic connections between humans and machines, the real-time platform assists customers in converting material into compelling conversions. 

In addition to his full-time role at Speech Graphics and Rapport, Gregor is also a Supervisory Board member at System Industrie Electronic Holding AG.


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