Animating speech of an avatar representing a participant in a mobile communication including preparing the avatar for display for display including: selecting images to represent the participant, selecting a generic animation template having a mouth, fitting the images with the generic animation template, and texture wrapping the one or more images representing the participant over the generic animation template; selecting background media; displaying images texture wrapped over the generic animation template with the background media; and animating the images including: receiving an audio speech signal, identifying a series of phonemes, and for each phoneme: identifying a next mouth position, altering the mouth position, texture wrapping a portion of the images corresponding to the altered mouth position, displaying the texture wrapped portion and playing, synchronously with the displayed texture wrapped portion, the portion of the audio speech signal represented by the phoneme.