InfoWiz: An Animated Voice Interactive Information System

To encourage spoken interactions, we added an animated character, a cartoon wizard, who attempts to engage the user in conversations about SRI. As Don Nielson (to whom this system is dedicated) used to say, talking to a computer without an animated persona who can speak back is like talking to a wall. Initially, we made our own animations based on a popular clip-art figure. In later incarnations of the interface, we adopted Microsoft Agent’s Merlin character to provide the graphics for the system.