Holly(oaks) talking head is FUTURE of face messaging, claims prof A simulated talking head that can apparently express human emotion has been created by engineers in Cambridge, England. Think Red Dwarf meets, er, Hollyoaks. The computer system called "Zoe" can generate voice and facial expressions from typed text and - more importantly from a commercial perspective - can potentially be used …
Was playing Mass Effect 2 recently and was struck how "forced" all the facial expressions looked. Very disappointing, given the fully pre-programmed nature meant they really could have done better than "smile/neutral/grimace".
So something that lets them cheat would help a lot for making believable characters.
Although nothing can save them from such terrible dialogue...
I think Star Cops is still very technologically accurate. Apart from the space bits ;)
Star Cops had a digital assistant called "Box". Apparently the original idea for Box was that it would use the voice of the owner, although that was dumped during filming.
So the original Box idea was that it should ring someone and basically impersonate their owner.
Gee, it's come around again. Anybody remember the 'headcasting' application that once shipped with the Matrox G550 graphics card? This seems to be the great-grandson of that technology, 12 years on. It didn't catch on then, and I'd be surprised if it does this time around.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/789/3
I do wonder if it would not be simpler to, you know, insert a camera into the phone, and, like, image or film the actual expression of the sender rather than simulate it, but perhaps that technology must first be developed
Can the software please add a sarcastic expression to the above statement?
It is of course handy if you want to send an insincere emotion, but that would of course be unethical, so nobody would do that
^ Same emotion again, please
"On BBC News this morning they showed "her" in angry mode shouting "You're late! Where on earth are you?" in a way that I found really quite unnerving. I suspect anyone feeling a little harassed would not want one of these."
And anyway, isn't shouting at you that way the privilege the missus?
This sounds oddly reminiscent of a Douglas Adams interview I once read, that was given around *30* years ago:-
http://yourcomputeronline.wordpress.com/tag/douglas-adams/
“[MIT] were showing me some research they were doing on video telephones. They reckoned that everybody has a number of people they regularly speak to on the telephone at your telephone you could have a small computer, storing video pictures of those people. When somebody rang you, a phonetic program would find the right picture and move the mouth in time with the words.
“They were very pleased with this [but] if you look at that logically you’ll see that this is not increasing communication — it is actually decreasing it.
“If you talk to somebody on the telephone your attention is concentrated on what they are saying. When you talk to somebody face to face or even on a television screen you get the message partly from their gestures and the expression on their face. But if you are seeing a picture which is not giving you any additional information the two impressions are totally contradictory.
“If someone rings up to say ‘Oh God, I’ve just gone bankrupt’ or ‘My wife’s run off' and you have this bright, smiling picture with the lips moving in an utterly grotesque way, it is not actually helping you to understand what the person is saying."
“The whole project is ludicrous and self-defeating but I couldn’t get the researchers at MIT to understand that.”
Now, this present-day equivalent is- in theory- attempting to match the mood of the person to the head. But in practice, it's still closer to Adams' ludicrous example above. It's applying a generic, pre-packed, pre-defined expression to the face that will convey none of the subtleties of *your* real expression and how that conveys your *actual* emotions. In short, it tells you nothing more than a single word or phrase covering your mood would.
In this way, despite its superficial improvement over MIT's early-80s example, it has *exactly* the same problem- it actually *decreases* communication by distracting from the content with misleading visual content.
That's only in that particular use case. Where I think this might be useful is in human-computer interaction, for example, giving Siri a face or making characters in computer games more realistic and variable.
Wasn't there an Iain M Banks novel that had a message being sent as a transcript of the sender's mind-state so that the recipient could question them for all the details that were necessary? I remember the feeling of distaste when the temporary mind was destroyed after the message had been delivered...
Its dead Dave.
What? What about the cool factor of having Siri with a face? What about that?
Its dead. Its all dead Dave.
Doesn't anyone want to scan their head and send it to all their mates so emoticons come with their own face? That's a great idea!
Its dead. Its all dead Dave...
This seems utterly pointless. We have plenty of messaging options for things like this already.
If I need to let someone know I'm late using my mobile phone I can:
1. Send a plain text SMS message
2. Send a Picture and text MMS message
3. Send a short video as an MMS message
4. Make a voice only phone call to them
5. Make a video call to them
Not to mention the myriad of social media and e-mail options.
The thing is, when was the last time you did anything other than use a text only SMS or a voice only call for a message like "I'm going to be late"?
If it was for a longer conversation than that, this technology would essentially be replacing human interaction with digital avatars.
... being drawn on the question "but what is it for?"
The answer they gave, an animated message avatar, was presumably an off-the-top-of-the-head remark which has been rightly ridiculed. You're better off at one of the extreme ends of the groovy-boring spectrum - either: "Because it's cool, the use of this is limited only by your imagination" or: "to determine whether emotional facial modelling could be achieved in a smartphone-sized application"
I always liked the answer, "this is the research department, ask the chaps over there in development".
Once you have deflected the question the reporters and commenters will do your work for you: Richard12 probably nailed it in the first comment --- animating NPCs in video gaming.
1) NPC's in games
2) SIRI with a face - costumize your digital assistant with the face of your favourite actor/musician/polititian :-)
3) Kiosks with a friendly face - for everything from buying a soda to subscribing cable TV or searching for tourist sights
4) Automated contact centers - with the new HTML extensions, soon every browser will be able to make video calls, and the "Click to Call" or chat will have you talking to Zoe
Automated call centers with a friendly face
> “Present day human-computer interaction still revolves around typing at a keyboard or moving and pointing with a mouse.” said the University of Cambridge's professor Roberto Cipolla. “For a lot of people, that makes computers difficult and frustrating to use. [..]"
For me that is precisely one of the advantages of computers... Voice communication is just too ambiguous.
And the idea of a photo-realistic computer-controlled face image is just too weird. Especially if it looks like some real person. Think of the interesting possibilities of misusing it. A video of me apparently saying stuff I would never agree with, or worse...
Nuke this invention from orbit before it is too late.
The crew are dead, killed by a radiation leak. The only survivors are Dave Lister, who was in suspended animation during the disaster, and his pregnant cat, who was safely sealed in the hold. Revived three million years later, Lister's only companions are a life form who evolved from his cat, and Arnold Rimmer, a hologram simulation of one of the dead crew. I am Holly, the ship's computer, with an IQ of 6000, the same IQ as 6000 PE teachers.
a user could, for example, text the message 'I’m going to be late' and ask it to set the emotion to 'frustrated'
So much simpler than texting the message "I'm frustrated because I’m going to be late", or "I’m going to be late. How frustrating!"**. Or even, perish the thought, phoning and sounding frustrated.
Also, I'm a bit concerned that the face might express, say, sexual frustration, rather than mild annoyance at being late.
** OK, Shakespeare, that's enough emoting.
I got a completely different impression of what this research was about when viewing the BBC video clip versus reading this Reg article.
Everyone seems to have latched on to using this technology to make a text message spoken, which is pretty pointless.
The first commentator was bang on the money. The interesting thing about this piece of research is that it is taking written text, and then using a form of markup, it producing a face that reads that text with realistic facial expressions and voice tonality. Sure, plenty of characters in video games do this already (while having more realistically rendered faces), but with those characters the facial movements and voice where recorded from an actor in a motion capture studio. In this case the facial movements and voice tonality are being procedurally generated. Do this realistically enough and you won't have to get an actor to pre-record everything you want a character to potentially say.
So this research is basically looking to improve the 'speech output' side of computer interactions/games. Good luck on solving the speech input side though. We'll probably be using dialogue wheels for input for a while yet.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
