Talking Slide Avatars: Open-Source Multimodal Communication Approach for Teaching

Slide-based teaching is widely used in higher education, yet in online, hybrid, and asynchronous contexts, slides often lose instructor presence, narrative continuity, and expressive framing that help learners connect with course content. Full lecture video can partly restore these qualities, but it is time-consuming to record, revise, and reuse. This study presents a practice-based implementation and analytic reflection of an open-source workflow for creating talking slide avatars. The workflow integrates OpenVoice for text-to-speech and authorized voice-style conversion with Ditto-TalkingHead for audio-driven talking-image synthesis, enabling instructors to transform a short script and an authorized or synthetic portrait image into a narrated video for slide decks or HTML-based lecture materials. Rather than treating this workflow only as a technical solution, the study frames talking slide avatars as multimodal communication artifacts at the intersection of digital pedagogy, aesthetic education, and art-technology practice. The paper documents the production pipeline, analyzes communicative and aesthetic affordances, and proposes practical guidelines for script length, image selection, pacing, disclosure, accessibility, consent, and ethical use. Its contribution is not a validated learning intervention, but an educator-oriented open-source production model and communication-design framework. The study concludes that short, transparent, and carefully designed avatars may provide a reusable communication layer for introductions, transitions, reminders, and recaps when used selectively and with appropriate ethical safeguards.