Hello everybody, I forgot to properly introduce myself, so I’ll do that now.

As you might guess from my nickname, I’m Mark, PhD student at the University of Twente (and waiting for my committee to approve my thesis, yay). During my PhD I mostly worked on the dialogue management of the Semaine project (http://www.semaine-project.eu).

At this moment (besides waiting for my committee), I’m working on a complete virtual agent for our department, including speech/video input and an avatar with speech, gestures and facial expressions. Undoubtedly I will post some details here later on, and I have some plans/hopes to release the complete agent open-source next year (I’m trying to use open-source software only, and everything I develop will be too).

~Mark tM

Welcome! The demo video on the semaine site is impressive.

I have been looking around for open source conversational avatar / face generation software but haven’t found anything promising - even something as simple as a cartoon face would be useful.  Did you build your own for the project?

Thanks The demo-video on the site is actually quite old. A more recent video is this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KZc6e_EuCg

About face software, there are a couple of alternatives (assuming you want real-time control over the avatar). In the project, we use Greta (http://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/~pelachau/Greta), but a more flexible alternative is developed at our own university, namely Elckerlyc (elckerlyc.ewi.utwente.nl). Is that what you need?

I Mark, nice project. Welcome to the site.

Thanks for the links.  Both look interesting - I will try Elckerlyc first as I prefer to work in Java.

No problem. If you have any questions or problems, let me know

Hi Mark, welcome!

The Semaine project looks very interesting—I just watched a few videos. The project website states that your focus is primarily on non-verbal communication skills. How straightforward would it be for a bot developer to integrate their bot’s i/o with Semaine? That is, how modular are the components that control when and how the bot responds? Can dialogue be changed, while maintaining its timing and non-verbal responses? (And retaining Semaine’s ability to choose not to respond at all!)

Thanks Mark and welcome to Chatbots.org!!!

We’ve writtten about Spike, one of the offspring virtual agents of the SEMAINE project, a while ago:
http://www.chatbots.org/research/news/virtual_human_conversational_virtual_agent_dialogue_emotional_confrontation/

We’ve published this in our state of the art category:
http://www.chatbots.org/state_of_the_art

In other words: this is great stuff!!!

Keep us posted on the progress, and if you need any help from Chatbots.org, please let me know! We have 13.000+ members nowadays, that gives many opportunies.