Virtual Head Can Express Emotions

A virtual 'talking head' called Zoe that expresses a range of human emotions could become the friendly face of future computers.

Here is a short video -

Professor Roberto Cipolla said: "This technology could be the start of a whole new generation of interfaces which make interacting with a computer much more like talking to another human being. "It took us days to create Zoe, because we had to start from scratch and teach the system to understand language and expression. Now that it already understands those things, it shouldn't be too hard to transfer the same blueprint to a different voice and face." The system is light enough to work in mobile phones and uses could include smartphone personal assistants or face messages to replace texts. It works by using a set of fundamental emotions. Zoe's voice, for example, has six basic settings: happy, sad, tender, angry, afraid and neutral.

This really reminds me of Red Dwarf

They say that in future you could upload your own face and voice to create a digital personal assistant on computers or smartphones, they also hope to use this to help autistic children learn emotions and deaf children how to lip read.

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reply to post by Lady_Tuatha

This is horrible, as someone who is studying 3d art i can tell you this is very outdated, any gaming company that produces triple A games can do something 10 times better than this, not to mention a studio for movies. This seems like technology for 1995-2000.

People interacting with this new interface will be plagued by nightmares where disembodied heads alternating shouting and whispering to them with randomly fluctuating tones.

No. Until they can sound at least half-way sane and steady, this approach will not fly. Why do they bother showing off their "amazing new technology" when it still sounds like an illiterate psychopath? Anyone tried the screen-reader functions in Win 7? Same deal.

Well it is a work in progress, the engineers are currently working on making the generated speech smoother so they can make the avatar more realistic.

I agree tho, thought we would be further ahead by now.

Why would you want to interact with that pale lifeless mug? Or even your own face?

Give me Cortana!

whY.cAnt.they.fix.THE.way.THOse.things.SpEak?

Get me EDI please...



(and if it isnt too much trouble... the looks would help also...)

Originally posted by CesarO
This is horrible, as someone who is studying 3d art i can tell you this is very outdated, any gaming company that produces triple A games can do something 10 times better than this, not to mention a studio for movies. This seems like technology for 1995-2000.

yeah, but if it's Treyarch will she answer my questions a few seconds before i ask them? cough:bops2:cough


also, that voice sounds like shes uptight and ready to burst into tears. who would want to deal with that? terrible terrible