Agent's Expression news

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.

Jeopardy! competition is a popular US quiz show featuring trivia in various topics (history, literature, the arts, pop culture, science, sports, geography, wordplay, etc.), broadcasted since 1964. The show has a unique answer-and-question format in which contestants are presented with clues in the form of answers, and they must phrase their responses in form of a question.

From 14-16 February 2011 the first ever man vs. machine Jeopardy competition will be held. Human competitors will fight against Watson, a supercomputer that extracts knowledge from enormous amounts of data at a much faster rate than human beings or any other computer system is capable of.

Just wondering why I have never written about Milo, a virtual agent, conversational avatar, chatbot responding to voice, face and gestures. Very cool presentation.

Ever realized that not only humans are culturally bounded, but virtual agents as well? Practices that are completely accepted in some cultures would totally be rejected by other cultures. Even when they are part of so-called viral campaigns, which tend to be a little bit shocking. However, at Chatbots.org we believe learning starts with openness and sharing. So be prepared!

We’ve stumbled upon Anna and Adam, virtual agents (chatbots or virtual assistants if you prefer) of Polish company Inpost. Both Anna and Adam can be undressed if you know the codes! In fact, for non-Polish speaking people, it would come across as a code; for Polish natives it’s about answering questions about Inpost’s new service called paczkomat. They learn by interacting with Anna or Adam.

In most cultures, this kind of practice would be highly unusual for established brands like InPost. Note that Inpost is not a silly new web startup: They are the first company in Poland offering postal services throughout the country via its own units, represented in 200 cities of Poland via 800 Customer Service Points. Inpost is part of the Integer.pl group which is listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Anna was developed by a large virtual agent developer in Poland named Stanusch Technologies.

Wanna undress Anna or Adam yourself or checkout the video? Click below for the codes.

Steve Di Paola of the Simon Fraser University demonstrated a virtual agent system to Chatbots.org.  This system interprets real time emotions in input such as voice, and shows facial expressions and gestures.

During the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (related to IVA Gala), Steve showed us how his parameterized facial animation system operates. His goal is to develop a system that can handle any face type, behavior, and voice to be used in games, movies and virtual agent worlds. Their current focus is on how emotions should be expressed.

In the first few minutes of the video, he demonstrated various types of faces. Steve grabbed his microphone and started talking. The avatar spoke similar to Steve and his (or her) lips were synchronized with his words. As soon as Steve raised or changed his voice, the avatar acted correspondingly, which was absolutely amazing. It widened its mouth when talking louder; it moved its eyebrow to emphasize what it was saying, and it responded to a drumming sound. Wow!

More explanation and images after break.

Previously the construction of believable characters based on artificial intelligence required hand-crafting thousands of sentences - aimed at creating a high-quality chat bot brain. A few creative people took up the challenge and authored some of the best chat bots around today. Until now, the tedious and expensive process of developing and training a high-quality believable chat bot remained a significant hurdle to widespread chat bot adoption.

The new, patent-pending Pandorabots SpellBinderTM technology reduces chat bot creation time enormously. Pandorabots SpellBinder automatically learns from conversational transcripts. Nothing else on the market today can create high-quality and unique chat bot characters as quickly and efficiently as Pandorabots SpellBinder (Synthetic PErsonality Language Learning for Bot Intelligence from Natural Dialog Example Recordings).

Ford has filed a patent called “Emotive Text-to-Speech System and Method” describing a system that can not only simulate emotion when reading out directions and describing traffic problems, but could also detect the emotion of the operator of the car and interact with them in ways designed to, oh, soothe a little road rage. The avatar is said to “appear to become frustrated” if the driver is a lead-foot, and may say “Your driving is hurting my fuel efficiency.” Or, if a driver is going too fast, the dash-bound assistant could turn blue, ask what’s wrong, and suggest a more direct route to their destination.