talk with an avatar?
 

We would like to allow the user to have a bidirectional conversation with an avatar. Two questions:
1. Do the new avatars have functionality similar to the "loadspeech" function of the old avatars (play a wav file and move their lips more or less in synch)? I realize that the new avatar documentation is sketchy at this point but will be improved in the near future, so perhaps I will just have to wait for that.

2. Then we'll want the user to say something back to the avatar, speaking into a microphone plugged into the sound card. Can my script access the audio input (converted to digital by the soundcard) so we can tell when the user stops speaking? Vizard seems to have hooks for many types of input devices, but I have not seen mention of a sound-card audio input.

Thanks -- Eliot Smith

Hi Eliot,

The new avatars have a speak command similar to the old loadspeech command. This is available in the latest version. However, it doesn't work with the default heads that come with the avatar. You will need to create your own head that contains a morph target for opening the mouth. The next version of Vizard, which will be released in a few weeks, will have a sample that shows how to do this.

We recently created a plugin that allows a user to record audio from a microphone to a wav file. However, it doesn't give the user real time access to the microphone data. I will try to add this feature before the next release.

How can I get real time access to the microphone data?