hello all

i am looking to build an animated character with our NLP engine as the backend. I have gone to the sitepal website and was wondering if there is a cheaper alternative out there

pls help

cheers

akshat
http://www.alabot.com

Good question Akshat. I’ve seen many avatar creation sites, but rarely something like SitePal. Have you considered using a video character like on http://www.avaguide.net/

thanks Erwin for the reply.

i need something which allows me to integrate alabot in the backend -

SitePal, in my opinion is a good value, and I think chatbots benefit from success stories like SitePal. In my personal opinion, I don’t know if there are cheaper, better alternatives. SitePal is pretty good.

I love this stuff, researching fully 3D animated characters real time voice synthesis!

http://www.newsai.com/TV.php

Here is my youtube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/8planet

It may not be cheaper or better than commercial products.  But building your own 3D animated talking robot is definitely a lot of FUN!

May I ask a very simple favor?
When you click this Google link:
http://www.google.com/search?q=News+A.I.

Do you see: News A.I. • newsAI.com on the first page? 
(If yes, please click it. Thanks!)

why don’t we create a open source animated character library. Everybody can extend and build upon. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Erwin,

I think I may know of one (subject to verification), but it will need a great deal of work on the phonemes and lip posture targets.  One interesting point, is that Alan Turing was briefly involved with Bell Labs engineers in 1943 building an analog vocoder , so it is very much related to what we all enjoy.

Without research. Can’t you use IMVU:
http://www.imvu.com

or

http://www.marlinstudios.com/

or (search for avatar - animated - lipsync)

http://www.top4downlo
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/11/cheerioke-create-animated-avatars-with.html (seems oddcast again)
ad.com/free-voip-avatar-lipsynch-animated/

Flipz IV Flash (this seems serious)
http://www.vicman.net/download/15823/

Lots of examples on this blog: you might want to approach the author:
http://thetalkingavatar.com/?tag=lipsync

Import/Export a SL avatar????
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LipSync

Wow Erwin! 

Good job!

dont’t understand this:

Note: I need citations for this post.  My comments are casual at this point.

That was meant to warn readers that my post, at that point, was still being edited.
Normally, I don’t do that, but I wanted to respond to you quickly, since you were online.

thats a lot of info indeed - thanks Erwin and 8PLA.

ok someone sent this as well - http://haptek.com/

Haptek requires a player be downloaded… Just saying.  Otherwise haptek looks nice. 
Maybe, the download is totally worth it, compared to other options?

Here is another, just for reference:

http://www.sitechatters.com/

What you may not notice, is how these may all be 2D x,y coordinate systems,
which only simulate the z-axis in three dimensional rotations.

Flash is a vector based system which traditionally is known to be a 2D platform.  Of course, this may all be changing in the newer versions of Flash, which may support 3D gaming.

Flash is, however, the best for scaling, and it is the best solution for efficient bandwidth.  And make no mistake, you can do a lot in 2D. Here is my favorite 2D flash animation, compliments of FOX Public Relations and FOX Studios:

http://www.8pla.net

Thanks Akshat.  This is a really good topic.

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

one more

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

thanks 8pla appreciate the inputs.

Actually, but not really my topic, I understood that HTML5 will support vector based animations without downloading plugins. I guess it would be good to anticipate the this future and select a tool based on this HTML5 technology.

Akshat -
All this effort to avoid payment of $20 a month   - wouldn’t your time be better spent enhancing your NLP & AI ?

To add a bit of information to the discussion -
Sitepal brings to the table not only the 3D animated speaking characters, but also realtime TTS (in 26 languages).
Neither characters or TTS require any client side install. It is all transparent to the end user.

The realtime TTS is implemented as a client side API - literally a “sayText” function - which is available in either ActionScript or JavaScript. ( Other API functions are available to control speech aspects, facial expressions etc. )
The implementation works very well in conjunction with an AI engine - we’ve had a number of technology providers use it to bring their AI to life.

btw - we are now working on adding text based facial animations - check out this demo (click on next char to see some other characters) -
http://host.staging.oddcast.com/content2/customhost/3dtemp/expressions/Editor3D_Release.swf
so you would for example be able to insert “facial cues” in your chat responses that would drive the character to animate at the right time etc.

Hope this info is helpful
Gil
SitePal Team