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 1, 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.