Today I’ve Skyped with Vittorio Rossi who did a great job back in 2005 by setting up the Virtual Humans Forum. It has grown very heavily since then but unfortunately, today, it is not as active as it used to be.

Although both Vittorio and I have ideas on how to work together, we are very interested in your opinion. What are the strong points of Chatbots.org and the Virtual Humans forum and how could we achieve synergy?

This is not an easy question, since there is years of content on both forums to consider.
Perhaps Chatbots.org forum may focus more on the brain simulation aspect of chatbots
while Virtual Humans forum may focus more on 3D model body simulation for chatbots.

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your suggestion! Did you we’re working on separate forum boards for:
-animation
-robo ethcis
-biometrics
and
-speech technology.
http://www.chatbots.org/forums

Chatbots.org’s mission is to advance humanlike conversational AI, so everything with is within scope. So restriction of our scope is probably not the most logical idea.

But there is a aspect of ‘virtual humans’, which we don’t cover, and that the VPH (I’m sure you love acronyms ), the virtual physiological human. Another meaning of the same term. It would be logical to co-operate with companies in that area, but that’s not the case for Vittorio.

Any other suggestion?

Erwin asked, “Did you [know] we’re working on separate forum boards for:
-animation -robo ethics -biometrics and -speech technology”

No. Erwin… I did not.  That’s really terrific news.

3D animation is very challenging.  Someone could easily spend two full, intense semesters
at college becoming a total beginner in 3D animation. But it is a lot of fun!

My fully 3D animated chatbot with animated speech was broadcast on CNN TV news in
prime time.  Fast computers with lots of gigabytes or RAM are very useful for rendering animation,
which often takes hours, running overnight.

I suggest that it would be helpful to be able to embed videos
in the animation forum or play audio files in the speech forum.

  Have been an ultra Hal fan for ages and I am still using some of the plug-ins which VR had made for ultra Hal. I thought he did an excellent job writing the script for programming ultra Hal and because of this I would use his talent in this area. I recently had been switching between using ultra Hal and the modified VirtualFem which I had replaced the Aiml files with Aiml files from Rebecca. Ultra Hal was quick to learn and any of the Learn or Bad answer Aiml files that I had tried did not work with VirtualFem.
  I definitely think a learning type function is definitely needed in any type of chatbot but this already exist if you use the right engine or platform (I am still new to this and my terminology may not be correct). Also I definitely feel some type of graphics is needed for some type of character.
  I am more familiar with the VirtualHumans forum and over the years I have seen quite a few discussions that I thought were original and very good concepts. 

” the virtual physiological human. Another meaning of the same term. It would be logical to co-operate with companies in that area, but that’s not the case for Vittorio.”
  I’m not sure what you mean
Carl Jackson

Hi all,

I really appreciate the great work which Erwin has been doing here and talking with him was a pleasure !

I am planning some enhancements to my Virtual Humans Forum, which should be online in a couple of months. Meanwhile I’ve added a “partner site” link on the header of our pages and opened a similar discussion on my forum:
http://www.vrconsulting.it/vhf/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1199

Any comment or suggestion is welcomed.

Thank you

Hi, Vittorio, and welcome!

I’m ashamed to admit that I stopped visiting the VH forums almost a year ago, because at the time the topics being discussed were just a bit too far “above my pay grade”, but I think I’ll have to go about correcting that absence. I’ve learned a lot in the past year, and perhaps now I can both get something from, and give something to, the place. I look forward to a mutually beneficial alliance between us, as well as seeing what you have in store.

Just picked up this thread on my iPod Touch while traveling in Uruguay .. using my unofficial Virtual Humans Forum feedbot, a kind of Twitterbot, at http://twitter.com/virtualhumans .. (also have one for this forum at http://twitter.com/chatbotsforum ..)  Both feed into my Twitterlist at http://twitter.com/mendicott/chatbotters ..

Saludos desde Montevideo,

- Marcus Endicott
  http://twitter.com/mendicott

It would be great to see the VH forum come back to life.  I too noticed that over the past year the place totally dried up, it used to be full of interesting discussion and was THE ai site to visit.  I think that sadly it lost it’s way.

Maybe a partnership may inject some life into it.  You should define both your scope, I agree.

At AI dreams we try to cover a lot of this stuff you talk about doing now, sometimes I think we might be trying to cover too much ground.

Let’s see the VH forum rise from the ashes.

Marcus Endicott - May 14, 2011:

Just picked up this thread on my iPod Touch while traveling in Uruguay .. using my unofficial Virtual Humans Forum feedbot, a kind of Twitterbot, at http://twitter.com/virtualhumans .. (also have one for this forum at http://twitter.com/chatbotsforum ..)  Both feed into my Twitterlist at http://twitter.com/mendicott/chatbotters ..

Saludos desde Montevideo,

- Marcus Endicott
  http://twitter.com/mendicott

Marcus, was it you who made the ‘Unofficial Ai Dreams Forum’ twitter feed ?

Virtual Humans Forum has always been a nice place to visit. I post there often. It seems taylored for virtual human creators which there aren’t many of. Maybe if it was called Chatbot Forum (as an example) it might be a lot more popular. I don’t see it really being a whole lot more popular until more people start creating their own VH projects. It takes a lot of work and dedication. What else is there to talk about except possible applications of virtual humans? We can talk… but the talk runs out if people aren’t actually working on something or have their own applications going.

Serg Parada - May 14, 2011:

Maybe if it was called Chatbot Forum (as an example) it might be a lot more popular.

Welcome over here as well! Terminology is quite a challenge in our field. We’ve identified 130 synonyms of the term chatbot last month. Chat bot, chatterbot and virtual human are (or have been used) appears to be used regularly by AI developers; embodied conversational agent, conversational agent and artificial conversational entity are quite popular in the academic world, and businesses tend to go for virtual agent in the US and virtual assistant in Europe when they integrate automated chat in customer self service pages of large co-operations.

Due to widespread disagreement on terminlogy, Google is also confused. Try a few of these terms yourself and discover how many 2003 pages still turn up on Google page 1. Also the DMOZ entry on chatterbot is hopelessly outdated (anyone with contact at the DMOZ????) . Actually the Virtual Human Forum, Alicebot, the AI Dreams forum and Chatbots.org should be listed 1,2,3 and 4. We should co-operate to achieve these positions, get more traffic, and add more value to the communities out there, potential AI developers and 3d human animators.

Which synonym will win? It sounds to me like they are named respectively to their function… although they overlap in many areas. Maybe it’s just a matter of time before “virtual human” becomes the word.

I was also thinking VHF could supply a chatbot kit written in various languages. That would give everyone a chance to start their own project and learn from the experience. Certainly lots to talk about.

It’s an interesting discussion Serg! We might want to continue our discussion on ‘who will win’ on http://www.chatbots.org/synonyms , the dedicated thread for this ...

We could think about using our RSS feeds, to display what’s going on in the other forums, like in the footer over here:
http://www.dutchcowboys.nl

How about the VHF logo on your homepage?