It seems there has been a good bit of debate on the conspicuous absence of *convenient* avatar solutions.  I haven’t really seen a consumer product better than the $40 a month SitePal for the web.  There is now @Sparking2gether FIONA; but, I haven’t actually seen any deployed solutions yet.  For the desktop, there is Guile3D Denise.  But, I’ve not seen any *generic* consumer oriented avatar solution for mobile yet, much less multi-platform. 

Another thing that I’ve noticed is that no one seems to be making affordable plug and play talking heads.  What I’m thinking of here is (cheap) life-size animatronic talking head with plug and play USB or wifi.  Of course, there is Hanson Robotics at the custom high-end, but not much in the mid-market or low-end.

> http://www.meta-guide.com/home/about/best-of-the-best-videos/100-best-hanson-robotics-videos

> http://www.meta-guide.com/home/talking-head/100-best-animatronic-head-videos

> http://www.meta-guide.com/home/talking-head/100-best-robot-head-videos

See my recent Quora answer to: “I’d like to build a talking animatronic Beethoven bust for my music room, and don’t even know where to begin, how to get started?”

> http://www.quora.com/Robots/Id-like-to-build-a-talking-animatronic-Beethoven-bust-for-my-music-room-and-dont-even-know-where-to-begin-how-to-get-started

Chris Shaw showed some great avatars with Haptek and People Putty at the Chatbots 3.2 conference earlier this year (much better than Sitepak I have to add) but I haven’t seen or heard of any progress since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y1zAXt9lcM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBmTBNVuaLw

I use to have a Haptek character myself and was amazed by what it could do:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2iIuiT3IW8
Unfortunately, support stopped with Haptek a few years back and any OS after XP or non IE browser had trouble working with it and so I had no choice but to remove the avatar.

Marcus Endicott - Oct 20, 2012:

What I’m thinking of here is (cheap) life-size animatronic talking head with plug and play USB or wifi.  Of course, there is Hanson Robotics at the custom high-end, but not much in the mid-market or low-end.

There are two possible low end solutions- wowwee elvis alive and wowwee chimp alive are animatronic heads (first one is human, Elvis P. like face, the other is a chimp head) that can be found (used) on ebay for $50-100 USD.  There are some vids on how to control the heads programatically (I have used both heads to “talk” RSS feeds using windows TTS in C#).  I do not know of cheaper or more easilly hacked animatronics than the wowwee alive stuff.

To make a chat bot, the most difficult to get working part is speech recognition, though with a high quality TTS voice (like IVONA) output from the head, the results are pretty awesome.

Also the servos that make the mouth move, and facial expressions, head movements can be quite noisy and distracting if not isolated (for instance, by putting th head in a sealed plexi or glass case).

see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08YqQNgpJaw
http://youtu.be/dMOHxdAu_9k
http://youtu.be/4LLexWRZCtU
http://robotzsf.blogspot.com/

> http://www.meta-guide.com/home/about/best-of-the-best-videos/best-haptek-videos

At this point in time, I consider Haptek to be outdated technology; although, it was certainly an extremely user-friendly, generic avatar system.  I’m in touch with Chris Shaw (http://chrisshorts.com/) about his new project, Xprevo (http://xprevo.com/); and as far as I can tell, Xprevo will be nothing like Haptek.

> http://www.meta-guide.com/home/about/best-of-the-best-videos/best-wowwee-elvis-videos

I didn’t know about the WowWee Chimp, but did find a few more videos.

> http://www.meta-guide.com/home/about/best-of-the-best-videos/100-best-nabaztag-videos

In terms “toy” talking “heads”, it might also be worth taking a look at Nabaztag (aka “Karotz”).

I realize this is a somewhat dated thread but even though the xprevo avatars operate on “cloud” based devices, the characters are pretty much the same ones that Haptek already had or were created through their product, People Putty, which has been around for a long time.

The “nothing like” part of your statement, in this case, only applies to the characters / avatars that either are or will be used on mobile devices fitted with those xprevo characters..

In addition to Nabaztag and EmoSPARK, what other talking hardware devices are similar to Amazon Echo

- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Echo
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabaztag

- emospark.com
- myjibo.com
- theubi.com

- 100 Best Amazon Echo Videos | Meta-Guide.com
- 100 Best Nabaztag Videos | Meta-Guide.com
- Best EmoSPARK Videos | Meta-Guide.com
- Best Jibo Videos | Meta-Guide.com
- Best Ubi Videos | Meta-Guide.com

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