Expressive talking avatar synthesis and animation

The talking avatar, an animated speaking virtual character with vivid human-like appearance and real or synthetic speech, has gradually shown its potential in applications involving human-computer intelligent interactions. The talking avatar has rich communication abilities to deliver verbal and nonverbal information by voice, tones, eye-contact, head motion and facial expressions, etc. Avatars are increasingly being used on a variety of electronic devices, such as computers, smart phones, pads, kiosks and game consoles. Avatars also can be found across many domains, such as technical support and customer service, communication aids, speech therapy, virtual reality, film special effects, education and training [6]. Specific applications may include a virtual storyteller for children, a virtual guider or presenter for personal or commercial website, a representative of user in computer games and a funny puppetry for computer-mediated human communications. It is clearly promising that talking avatars will become an expressive multimodal interface in human computer interaction.