Digital Avatars, Conversational Agents, Sythetic Characters, and Talking Heads

April was a month of tours and travel, visiting different places, and bringing home interesting learning experiences and perspectives. Speaking of learning, I have noted some fascinating sites that deal with human-machine interaction in a different manner. Most GUIs are designed to inculcate task-centric behavior where users often learn to navigate a plethora of screens specific to the task at hand and perhaps master it. An interaction between a human and a system is usually disfluent and cannot be compared to an interaction between two people. In an attempt to improve the interactive experience, many research institutions and firms have begun to entertain the notion of digital avatar.

Well, what is a digital avatar you say? It is a design metaphor that is used to represent a real life human being. Avatars come in 2D and 3D models often with animation. Most people know these from Games/Entertainment Industry. They activate on initial page display, react to user inputs such as mouse clicks, keywords, audio commands, and natural language queries, and even act natural with human like gestures. Novel business uses of these avatars include support diagnostics, on-line synthetic CSR, customer training, and e-learning.