The Face of the Future

The technological union of ubiquitous personal computers, cheap high-performance graphics and audio, the Web and its expectations, international standards for showing multi-media, and research into Artificial Intelligence and Text to Speech Synthesis systems has recently resulted in Talking Head interfaces to applications and information. This paper details how our initial observations about how people relate to computer generated Talking Heads helped us to create a more believable and realistic Talking Head – a more humane Talking Head. The paper also presents results from the subsequent evaluation of the realism, believability and acceptability of the new Talking Head. Finally we look at where we go to from here and future applications of the Talking Head Technology.