SitePal Avatars Next Best Thing to Human

Linc Wonham — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:15:00 GMT

Gaining life through a unique technology called 3-D Photoface, an impressive new lineup of speaking avatars has been introduced by SitePal, a Web communications innovator owned by Oddcast. If one of SitePal’s 250-plus, customizable virtual people isn’t suited to delivering your company’s message or interfacing with customers, build your own talking head by uploading a photo and following a few simple steps.

SitePal is unveiling the avatars as its New Generation, and thanks to 3-D Photoface, they are the most lifelike creations we’ve seen on the Web. The animated speaking characters have strikingly human characteristics, down to their detailed facial expressions and customized voice personalities.

While the technology behind the new avatars may be complex, SitePal has made its implementation process quick and painless. In three easy steps users can design their own avatar or build from one of the hundreds in stock; record a script or use built-in text-to-speech (TTS) in multiple languages, and publish the character to their Web site, Flash application, E-mail, blog, PowerPoint or eBay auction, making it more personal and persuasive.

The four pricing packages range from $9.95 per month ($99.50/year) to $249.95 per month ($2,499.50/year), with the different features including the amount of audio streams and secure domains included, and levels of TTS functionality and lead generation. Advanced features include the SitePal Server API that allows comprehensive programming via secure API calls, and Advanced Asset Management for performing up to thousands of audio and background searches, sorting, filtering and bulk uploading.

Get Your Gravatar On

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:03:00 GMT

As a web professional, you have to make a conscious decision about what appears on your website. With so many many widgets, gadgets, and ad networks vying for the virtual real estate of your site, it's easy to see how quickly you can lose sight of what's really important - those visiting your Web property. One way to bring some soft features (those which add value while not distracting at the same time) into a Web property and give back a little to users is to reward them for commenting, sharing, etc. through the use of avatars. One way to do this is to use Gravatar.

Gravatar (an abbreviation for globally recognized avatar) is a service for providing globally-unique avatars. They're global in the sense that users can use them wherever they are online. On Gravatar, users can register an account based on their email address, and upload an avatar to be associated with the account. Gravatar plugins are available for WordPress (provided natively in WordPress as of v2.5) and are available as a third-party module in the Drupal web content management system and many others. As of late, I'm seeing more commercial CMS and blogging systems making Gravatar (or at least avatars) support native - and that's a good thing.

How It Works: When the user posts a comment on a blog that requires an email address, the software checks whether that email address has an associated avatar at Gravatar. If so, the Gravatar is shown along with the comment.

For WordPress users, there are actually quite a few gravatar plugins that might come in handy to add some virtual punch to your WP installation. The most popular seems to be WP-Gravatar, which lets bloggers use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with comments and allows publishers to set their own CSS style to use with the comments section and the author about box. It's been downloaded nearly 25K times, but there are some great alternatives including Easy Gravatars, Wavatars, and Gravatar (and userpics).

Learn more about Gravatars here.

Other options for creating a stronger sense of community might be to use the newly released Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect. Do you enable users to display avatars or gravatars? Do you feel it has provided value to your online community? Let us know by commenting below.

'Net Features : avatars

SitePal Avatars Next Best Thing to Human

Get Your Gravatar On