Communicate through technology

I received an email yesterday urging me to check out the virtual characters now available through Oddcast.  I’m interested in text-to-speech (TTS) which involves synthesizing recorded bits of speech into something that sounds like human speech. TTS involves typing out what you want the synthesizer to say. However, its not easy to recreate natural sounding human speech for all sorts of reasons. We still haven’t got there, but I was impressed with the virtual characters.

Via the Oddcast site I found another interesting blog, called New York State of Mind, put together by a student at Duke University in New York. In her last post she has a link to her ‘Bloggers bible’ – there were a few good tips and some recommendations for how to run a multiblogging blog. She blogs about a collaborative poem written about the 9/11 disaster.

On the topic of virtual characters, MyCyberTwin have developed an artificially intelligent character that can converse online with visitors. The character is given personality traits and conversation topics and can be embedded into blogs, virtual worlds, and social networks such as MySpace. Some businesses are looking at it for better brand experiences. By giving it your conversations you’ve had in emails, IM, it learns to talk and be like you!

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