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March 10, 2006
Animate your site
Sitepal is a service that will add customer relations advatars to your website. The avatar is customizable - and can speak to customers in Arabic, English, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portugese, Russian, Spanish, and several other langueages who alphabet I don't recongize.
A male and female character is available as well as an interesting collection of wardrobes. The guy can be turned into a construction worker, a cowboy, or an ordinary bloke. But there is no businessman image available for him. The woman, on the otherhand, seems a bit more formal, but also has no business suit.
The characters are hired out at $10 per month (actually, $9.95).
Sitepal is an nice permutation over earlier technology such as "Ana Nova Reads the News." Ananova debuted in 2000, and was based on a mixture of Posh Spice, Kylie Minogue and TV presenter Carol Vorderman. She was cast as the world's first virtual newscaster, capable of reading the news faster than any human.
Unlike the Sitepal person, Ananova was computer generated on the fly, and the synchronization of mouth movements with the text was quite a bit smootherr. But she which was a unique persona, spoke only English, and appeared on a single website. She was online for about a year until she vanished.
See also She loves me, she loves me not
References:
Ananova News, http://www.ananova.com/
Cyberbabe to read the news, BBC News, Monday, 17 January, 2000, 12:22 GMT, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/606855.stm
Posted by sjc at March 10, 2006 8:50 AM
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