Life-Like Characters. Tools, Affective Functions, and Applications

Abstract

Galatea is a software toolkit to develop a human-like spoken dialog agent. In order to easily integrate the modules of different characteristics including speech recognizer, speech synthesizer, facial animation synthesizer[ facial-image synthesizer ] and dialog controller, each module is modeled as a virtual machine having a simple common interface and connected to each other through a broker (communication manager). Galatea employs model-based speech and facial animation[ facial-image ] synthesizers whose model parameters are adapted easily to those for an existing person if his/her training data is given. The software toolkit that runs on both UNIX/Linux and Windows operating systems will be publicly available in the middle of 2003 [1, 2]