Talking heads are anthropomorphic representations of a software agent used to facilitate interaction between humans and the agent. They can be thought of as virtual humans capable of carrying on conversations with humans by both understanding and producing facial expressions and speech. The issues to be dealt with for the creating such agents span two major areas of research namely animation and AI. With regard to the design of conversational agents, the problems faced are similar to the issues in the Natural Language Processing of AI. AIML, a state-of-the-art technology which attempts to overcome these issues has been used for the design of the brain of the agent developed in this project. It implements a pattern-matching algorithm and gives the user a great amount of functionality by offering tags which helps to make the agent seem context aware and intelligent. Efficient visual presentation of this agent is made possible by the use of superior facial deformation techniques and scripting languages which provide the user with a high level view of the animations that can be realized.
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