zaterdag, april 21, 2007
Avatars on the cheap: sculptoris
If used sensibly, avatars have the potential to enhance the user interaction with your web site and the retention and fun factor of your e-learning modules.
Today I want to discuss one cheap way to include high quality talking avatars. I've been playing around with the Sculptoris Voice Lite program. On their site (www.sculptoris.com) you are greeted by one of the characters, and you can download a 30 day trial version. After that the license is only 99$ and you don't need to pay any redistribution rights of your character files that are exported as Flash 5 files. Flash has about 99% coverage if I believe Adobe, so it will play everywhere.
The program could not be more easy to use:
1- Choose the sound file (.wav) that contains the voice. It can be your own recording or a Text-To-Speech voice.
2- Optionally select the text file (.txt) that contains the text spoken in step 1. If you provide the file, the lip synchronisation will be more accurate.
3- Select the character to use. There are several build-in characters, male or female or even animal. If you purchase the additional Voice Character Creation Development Kit, you can make your own avatars or derive them from the free source files of the default ones.
4- Select the output flash file location and name.
5- Press 'Build Character'. Done. You will find the flash (.swf) and html preview file in the folder you selected. To include in your site, just copy/paste the HTML code and upload the flash file.
I've made two examples, one with Text-To-Speech synthetic voice, and one with my own voice.
First example can be viewed here.
The avatar (I named him Otto) asks one of the questions that I received from Lut for my birthday after my call in this blog post. The question is in English.
The Text-To-Speech voice was made with TextAloud, as described in this previous post.
The second example can be viewed here.
It is my own voice and gives you another question donated by my neighbour and brother-in-law Hans, this time in Dutch.
The recording is very basic and noisy because it is made with the default Sound Recorder tool found in Windows. There is probably much better available, but I'm not an expert on sound engineering and background noise reduction.
I think Sculptoris is a good and relatively cheap way to add some fun and interaction to your site or e-learning, and I'm considering moderate use of the flash avatars on about2findout.com.
Today I want to discuss one cheap way to include high quality talking avatars. I've been playing around with the Sculptoris Voice Lite program. On their site (www.sculptoris.com) you are greeted by one of the characters, and you can download a 30 day trial version. After that the license is only 99$ and you don't need to pay any redistribution rights of your character files that are exported as Flash 5 files. Flash has about 99% coverage if I believe Adobe, so it will play everywhere.
The program could not be more easy to use:1- Choose the sound file (.wav) that contains the voice. It can be your own recording or a Text-To-Speech voice.
2- Optionally select the text file (.txt) that contains the text spoken in step 1. If you provide the file, the lip synchronisation will be more accurate.
3- Select the character to use. There are several build-in characters, male or female or even animal. If you purchase the additional Voice Character Creation Development Kit, you can make your own avatars or derive them from the free source files of the default ones.
4- Select the output flash file location and name.
5- Press 'Build Character'. Done. You will find the flash (.swf) and html preview file in the folder you selected. To include in your site, just copy/paste the HTML code and upload the flash file.
I've made two examples, one with Text-To-Speech synthetic voice, and one with my own voice.
First example can be viewed here.The avatar (I named him Otto) asks one of the questions that I received from Lut for my birthday after my call in this blog post. The question is in English.
The Text-To-Speech voice was made with TextAloud, as described in this previous post.
The second example can be viewed here.
It is my own voice and gives you another question donated by my neighbour and brother-in-law Hans, this time in Dutch.
The recording is very basic and noisy because it is made with the default Sound Recorder tool found in Windows. There is probably much better available, but I'm not an expert on sound engineering and background noise reduction.
I think Sculptoris is a good and relatively cheap way to add some fun and interaction to your site or e-learning, and I'm considering moderate use of the flash avatars on about2findout.com.
Labels: avatars, sculptoris, Text-To-Speech, TTS
