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Mark Laing -- Talk with Mark Laing Learn about Virtual Hosts from a virtual host at Talkie.com Mark is very personable if not intelligently interactive. He's a good example of very practical interface that nearly anyone can use. Talkies pioneered this straight forward use of intelligent sound and media. |
Paige -- She's available from ECM Marketing. They'll build you a web host for your site. If you've read the book, you'll be able to direct her personality design and conversational characteristics. It could be a fun project.
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TV Girl -- You'll need to download Haptek's browser plug-in, but it's worth the time. Check her out. She's not exactly a virtual human, because she has no brain, but she is an example of the kind hight quality face/ body you can control with your Natural Language Engine. Haptek has a ton of free documentation on their site, to help you connect with your engine if you know a little programming. You can build your own characters using their People Putty application. Please buy it through this site by going back to the first page and clicking the link on the left. |
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Lauren -- She's a real Divabot, in fact she's won that title at ILC 2000, with her sassy conversational style and personality. (Learn more here.)I've taken the liberty to post the face of the human Lauren behind the Divabot. |
Lucy -- I like Lucy. She has a quirky way of talking because she's trying to make up actual English sentences and sometimes gets them a little screwed up. Talk to her for a while, tell her your name and she'll come round. Remember she's learning while you talk to her. |
Lola -- She's Haptek's Corporate Spokes V-woman. A well done example of corporate use. |
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Intel's Bill -- He's an excellent example of what can be done to make web pages more interesting and informative. He's not an intelligent agent, but rather another one of Talkie's clever applications using a virtual human presence to convey a sense of intimacy. I think you'll find Bill as engaging as Mark above. |
Eric Cosatto -- Eric is a genius at designing near human displays. While at ATT Labs he developed some characters that truly are difficult to differentiate from real. I've included two links. At this first link you can visit Eric's bare bones site which contains some of the most awesome mpg downloads of his work. Ver2elle This second link is a neat VTTS processor that allows you to have the characters say whatever you type in. Eric uses code symbols embedded in the text message to provide facial expression. Give it a try. VTTS Interface |
More Examples coming as I find good ones. If you know of any, please let me know via email. -P-
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Just for Fun, have a little chat with some of these on-line v-people.
V-people are everywhere. To be honest, most are not very engaging. We're just learning how to accomplish that. However here are a few that should keep you entertained for a while. They may even be able to provide you with useful information. Some are frustrating while others are actually a little entertaining. These are some of the better examples I've found recently. If you find others that you like as well or better let me know and I'll check them out for possible inclusion here. I'm hoping that over the next year or two you will create amazingly engaging v-people that will be represented here as you launch them.
You can build one of these critters too
You'll notice that on-line virtual people are created by all kinds of people. You don't have to be a professional to have significant success and make your mark on the V-human world. Look at Lorien; her Divabot award is impressive and she built it at PandoraBots where you can also build one. They use ALICE as their engine and have developed a very nice interface to help you get started, what's more, it's free. If you look up at the left hand menu on this and every page, you'll see links to several locations that will help you get started being a bot-master. I don't really like that term, because what we're trying to do is create V-people. Think about it....Bot....V-person. Which is mechanical and which is human like. The terms we use really say a lot about how we're thinking, so start thinking v-people. Okay so Bot is very short. Come up with something very short that projects a vision of warmth, communication and humanity. We should have a contest.
-P-
