Gil, I would be interested in some lastest SitePal developments, recently introduced features, future plans, best practices etc. Also pricing is interesting. Would it be possible for you to write a separate article on this (new thread).

Gil Sideman - Jun 28, 2010:

you can always purchase additional streams separately - without upgrading to a higher cost package.

Not at over $2,000 a month I can’t. Sitepal is excellent and it was very easy to integrate, but the costs are too prohibitive. If I could make over $2,000 every month from my chatbot website, I would have retired a long time ago.

@Square Bear: (very politely)
I don’t know… SitePal seems like a good way to help your chatbot help you retire:

Visitor: Mitsuku, can you talk to me instead of just typing responses?
Mitsuku: (typing) You have to be wearing your Mitsuku Tee Shirt to hear me.
Visitor: Oh! I don’t have a Mitsuku Tee Shirt yet.
Mitsuku: (speaking) 1,654,321 have purchased a Mitsuku Tee Shirt.  May I help you with your order?
Visitor: Yes! You’ve convinced me. Thank you Mitsuku.

My point being that any self respecting chatbot can keep track of resources to maximize return on investment.  And the resources are not just the costs, they also include bandwidth usage to optimize site performance to manage bottlenecks, and which sales pitch responses lead to orders.

Akshat Shrivastava - Apr 2, 2010:

http://www.cantoche.com/en~AvatarCreation.html

one more

I have written to them asking them about the sdk. will keep you guys posted.

Hi Akshat, thanks for mentioning us! I just discovered this interesting thread. Did you get support from Cantoche?

Laurent Ach
CTO of Cantoche

8PLA • NET - Jul 2, 2010:

@Gil:

Since everyone knows there’s no real “alternative to sitepal”.

To people who don’t know Canoche yet. These bots all use a Living Actor character created and animated by Cantoche :

http://www.chatbots.org/virtual_agent/ines1/
http://www.chatbots.org/virtual_agent/nora/
http://www.chatbots.org/virtual_assistant/laurent/
http://www.chatbots.org/virtual_agent/laura/
http://www.chatbots.org/virtual_assistant/emma_redoute/
http://www.chatbots.org/virtual_assistant/sylvana/
http://www.chatbots.org/virtual_assistant/marta/

You may also, check out another type of avatar interactive animations we created for Le Louvre: http://www.louvre.fr.

Laurent

I’ve split the new SitePal features to a new thread ‘New Sitepal Features’. The topic of this thread is ‘alternatives to sitepal’, so personally I believe it’s better to have the discussions on new sitepal features in a separate thread.

@Laurent Ach:

Please let me clarify that you have my full support as do all chatbots.org members.

As a hobbyist who really enjoys 3D animation with computer generated text to speech.  Examples: http://www.newsAI.com , http://www.newsAI.com/TV.php and more ...
Microsoft just published my Windows 7 app ...  Woo Hoo!  News A.I. NewsAI.com
http://lightitup.developforwindows.com  (Microsoft Silverlight required)

In my opinion, SitePal technology represents a unique selling point.

@Erwin:
I personally feel that it is very important for the chatbot community
to recognize its success stories, like Sitepal—with its existing features
that make it solid.  Not to mention we are very lucky to have Gil and
the Sitepal Team.

May I suggest we rename the thread to ‘Commercial Success Stories: Sitepal’
http://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewthread/155/

@8pla: cool you are discovering all the formating options on Chatbots.org

This time I don’t agree. The original question by Askhat, and I’d like to stick to it, is to find alternatives to Sitepal, or: to create a list of suppliers of animated human characters.

In the mean time, we’ve created such a list on our home page.

It would be good for SitePal to have 3-4 compelling competitors worldwide. This will demonstrate the market that it’s getting mature. That will make the pie bigger. More clients are willing to use avatars if the market is more matury. (just like Chatbots by the way). Market leaders like SitePal will profit most from a growing market. 50% growth in the market, will also be a revenue growth of 50% for SitePal. So probably they would even welcome more competition. 

Offtopic: One of the things we’ll launch soon, probably in August, is a dedicated forum on human character animation (next to AI Zone). That will also be a service to academic researchers of virtual agent/virtual humans.

Hi,

I read this thread some time ago and have decided, now that my own chat robot is more or less working, to provide my alternative to sitepal.

His name is LESLIE LINGUO (an acronym which stands for: ‘Learning English as a Second Language in English’) and he’s installed on a Centos 6 Linux Distribution, with Apache 2 and PHP5 on a VPS hosting account. He uses Program-O as an interface, Festival TTS for his speech synthesis, and LAME to convert his audio to mp3 format. His front end is scripted in PHP and I’ve included the PHP code for the TTS on the site.

My idea initially is to provide a free version “as-is” and a paid version with SITEPAL as they have much more realistic avatars, better voices, and lip movement, but that all depends on how successful his free version is.

http://www.linguo.org

Hi there, Alan, and welcome to chatbots.org!

You’ve done quite well, there, but if I might make a suggestion, the page loads a bit slowly each time, making the conversation feel very jerky and disconnected. I’ve taken the liberty of performing some experiments, and Leslie’s page can be converted to make use of AJAX functions, which will not only have the benefit of a smoother conversation flow, but it will also reduce server load by as much as 80%!

You already have my email address, so shoot me a note if you’re interested in trying out an AJAX style interface.
(This is GeekCaveCreations, from the Program O forums, BTW)

You’ve already done so much for me already, but I will definitely take you up on that!!! Thank you for the offer.

> http://twitter.com/mendicot/status/209701630428454912

Alan, I just tweeted about “Leslie Linguo” (above), great work!

= = =

> http://embots.dfki.de/EMBR/

EMBR: A Realtime Animation Engine for Interactive Embodied Agents

More to this thread, I’ve just come across this new avatar system from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), which looks promising!

Interesting link this EMBR system. Thanks Marcus.

@Marcus: I contacted someone from the EMBR project yesterday. Very interesting project indeed. Right up your alley, I think.

It communicates with the outside world through ActiveMQ messages. So I think it should be possible to link it with a chatbot using a web api.  The text part is formatted in SSML, the body movement is defined in another xml format (the SSML is part of it). This is apparently being developed as a new xml standard. Though, from looking at it briefly, I think it’s not there yet, especially from a chatbot point of view.

I would love to hook it up with my system, which I think can be done without much coding, if any at all. Just not yet the time (in a couple of weeks/months maybe)...