After Effects Lip Sync Auto-Detection

It’s been years since I have tried to use Character Animator to auto-detect lip sync for After Effects cartoon characters. I wasn’t happy with the results.

I have been using a .MOV file with time remapping and keyframes, where I scrub through the timeline audio and I set keyframes for the phonemes. The MOV file has a frame for each mouth, I scrub, I keyframe.

Right now I am making a project where most of the characters only have four different mouths for pretty much all of the sounds. Has anyone managed to build a better mousetrap for auto-detecting phonemes, are am I still resigned to scrubbing & keyframing?

Thanks.