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The Virtual Counselor - Automated Character Animation for Ambient Assisted Living

Authors:
Sascha Fagel
Martin Morandell
Christopher Mayer
Andreas Hilbert

Keywords: automatic character animation; embodied conversational agent; ambient assisted living; multimodal user interfaces; audiovisual speech synthesis

Abstract:
We present a system for automated animation of text or voice messages suitable for Ambient Assisted Living user interfaces. Input to the system can be text, a pre-recorded speech file, or the speech signal captured directly from the microphone. Speech animation parameters are calculated by a co-articulation model either for the voice audio or – if available – from the phone chain extracted from the Text-To-Speech processing step in case of text input. An animation script that layers body movements and speech animation is generated. This script is rendered and converted into an h.264 video by a computer game engine. The system is developed to be used in care services for elderly users within a European research project.

Pages: 184 to 187

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2013

Publication date: February 24, 2013

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4138

ISBN: 978-1-61208-250-9

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from February 24, 2013 to March 1, 2013