A Web-Oriented Java3D Talking Head

Facial animation denotes all those systems performing speech synchronization with an animated face model. These kinds of systems are named Talking Heads or Talking Faces. At the same time simple dialogue systems called chatbots have been developed. Chatbots are software agents able to interact with users through pattern-matching based rules. In this paper a Talking Head oriented to the creation of a Chatbot is presented. An answer is generated in form of text triggered by an input query. The answer is converted into a facial animation using a 3D face model whose lips movements are synchronized with the sound produced by a speech synthesis module. Our Talking Head exploits the naturalness of the facial animation and provides a real-time interactive interface to the user. Besides, it is specifically suited for being used on the web. This leads to a set of requirements to be satisfied, like: simple installation, visual quality, fast download, and interactivity in real time. The web infrastructure has been realized using the ClientServer model. The Chatbot, the Natural Language Processing and the Digital Signal Processing services are delegated to the server. The client is involved in animation and synchronization. This way, the server can handle multiple requests from clients. The conversation module has been implemented using the A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) technology. The output of the chatbot is given input to the Natural Language Processing (Comedia Speech), incorporating a text analyzer, a letter-to-sound module and a module for the generation of prosody. The client, through the synchronization module, computes the time of real duration of the animation and the duration of each phoneme and consequently of each viseme. The morphing module performs the animation of the facial model and the voice reproduction. As a result, the user will see the answer to question both in textual form and in the form of visual animation.