Agent's Expression news

Cantoche, a company that develops and distributes avatar SaaS products, announced today the release of Living Actor™ Assistant, a 100% online intuitive and low-cost tool that easily authors interactive talking animated avatars who automatically answer Web visitors’ questions. Living Actor™ Assistant enables small and middle size businesses to increase customer conversion rates while reducing their services costs through the use of conversational virtual assistants.

Can someone use a text-speech application that not only turns your words into speech but also translate them to language that you might not speak? Now, you can!

Highly expressive avatars presented on the video are used by Vcom3D in teaching Arabic as well as culturally appropriate gestures and behaviors useful when interacting with people from Arabic countries. Developed in cooperation with Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory for military and civilian personnel working in Iraq and Afghanistan, 3D Serious Game constitutes dynamic learning environment with embodied conversational agents that feature voice, text and gestural information.

Rapid-Learning and industrialization are key components for today’s e-learning managers. This is due to an urging need to control the training budgets, industrialize the production process, capitalize on best practices, and to reduce the Time-to-Market.

I’m pleased to publish this post following a very interesting interview with Michel Diaz, Associate Director at Fefaur, a leading French consulting company in the field of e-learning and management consulting. Michel explained his vision of how avatars can answer the needs of industrialization in e-learning production.

Imagine a world where you can talk to almost any electronic device in your household; you give commands to your fridge, your microwave, your car, your mobile and your TV without pressing a single button. Your voice is the sole control of the actions that you want executed by the device in question. It is a hands-free society, ruled by voice and gesture recognition. But aren’t we there already? There’s voice control technology out there that allows making simple requests like ‘call Fred.’ However, there’s one fundamental question about this technology; how intelligent are these human-machine conversations?

Humanoid examples from Japan and MIT, especially focussing on emotional sensing and emotional expressions

Life is much too serious and we all need more laughter in our lives.

Now that we are starting off fresh in the New Year it’s a good time to bring out your best – your sense of humor combined with your love of new technology.

Speech Technology Group cordially invites you to enter our speech humor contest.

Here is how it work’s – it’s easy:

The best submissions received by January 27th will be posted at http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com

The winner will be announced on February 3rd and gets a Kindle Fire.

Are you game?

For a quick sample to get your juices flowing and to sign up, do to http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com/speech-humor

Disney Research and Robotics Institute have developed a method which translates motions of actors into a 3D-face model.

The AVATAR kiosk as being developed by The University of Arizona, is an interactive screening technology which assists law enforcement at border crossings and airports to detect lies and other deceptive behaviours.

When individuals approach the kiosk, they scan their identification, and it detects pupil changes down in the millimetre level and asks a few questions. Border control would step in to work directly with individuals whose behavior is suspicious as flagged by the AVATAR Kiosk.

Imagine a TV that responds to your physical behaviour such as finger pointing, talking and other actions such as picking up a magazine. Basically, it is a TV that watches you via gesture recognition, voice recognition and image recognition and responds accordingly.