Sergey Tokarev: How did Reface become so much popular?

Sergey Tokarev, an IT businessman and RefaceAl investor, talked about the huge success of Reface (ex Doublicat), a face replacement app. RefaceAl, a Ukrainian IT development company, developed the app and released at the beginning of this year. The app has surpassed a major milestone of 4 million downloads on GooglePlay and AppStore in just six months.

History and Overview of Reface
In 2011, the RefaceAl company was founded in Ukraine. It worked as NeoCortex in the beginning. The development team started working on using existing machine learning methods in the field of face replacement. Later on, the team developed its own Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm. They named this new technology ‘RefaceAl’. The name of the company was replaced by RefaceAl from NeoCortex at that point.

Sergey Tokarev told the media about the development stages of this app. The Reface app allows its users to replace faces on GIF-images. The company took a long time to develop its own face replacement technology. It was an important and crucial stage for the development team as far as its success is concerned. The team took more than three years to successfully develop its own technology. After the first step, the company moved on to develop the Reflect app. The purpose of Reflect was to replace faces on photos. RefaceAl launched Reflect last year and continued its work on improving the technology. The next target of the Ukrainian company was to replace faces on videos. Tokarev said, “The work ended up with the development of Reface (Doublicat) that works with GIF-animation.”

Keys to Success
The uniqueness of the Reface app is the first and foremost advantage that helped it to gain huge attraction on the app stores. It uses artificial intelligence to replace faces while other face replacement apps use the Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) technology. The company developed its own technology, Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN). This technology is based on a machine-learning algorithm.

The second advantage is the quality of this app. The GIF-animation after the replacement of faces by using Reface is very close to reality. However, other such apps just allow their users to stretch a face on an image. It does not produce quality results as compared to the Reface results. The machine learning algorithm is playing a crucial role in terms of the quality of this face replacement app.

The third advantage received by the app is free shout-outs given by celebrities. The app was used by Jerry Heil, a famous Ukrainian singer, in the production of a video song. Olga Polyakova, another Ukrainian singer, also used the app in her song. Previously, Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, shared an image created by using the Reflect app. Sergey Tokarev said, “He used Reflect to swap faces with Dwayne Johnson. Musk posted the result on his Twitter account.” It helped Doubicat and Reflect to become popular by creating a chain reaction on social media.

Future Prospects of RefaceAl
Sergey Tokarev said that they were working on developing face replacement technology to be used in videos. Moreover, RefaceAl will develop software that will detect fake videos in which face replacement technology had been used. Overall, he was satisfied with the current progress of the two apps released by the company. The popularity of the Reface app is much higher than its competitors on the app stores due to the use of machine learning algorithm.