Avatars as Our Agents

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January 4, 2007 by Jim Parker in avatar, future, technology

Avatars will become our agents, handling all contacts with the world when we don’t want to or when we can’t.

We can’t be everywhere all of the time. But we want to be. Back in the day, we purchased answering machines, and then voice mail. These were (are) a very simple way of communicating to anyone the following:

Hello
Glad you called
I can’t take your call
Let me know what you want
I’ll get back to you

Perhaps not everyone wanted to communicate all of the above things, but everyone at least wanted to communicate one of them. In effect, we “programmed” our answering machines/voice mail to handle contacts from the world.

And my point in bringing up voice mail is that people don’t always want to be live or can’t always be live – yet, they still want to be properly represented. In this case, voice mail is acting as their agent.

Jump to today and beyond:

Avatars are commonplace today on the internet. Second Life and such virtual worlds aren’t the only place to find them though. Any graphical representation of your person is a form of avatar – be it a picture, a cartoon, a stick-in-the-mud, or anything. It is something that represents you. And these are found everywhere – Myspace, mybloglog, digg, blogs, youtube, flickr, etc, etc, etc.

However, the real future of avatars is with a company called OddCast. OddCast provides slick animation-synced-with-speech avatars. They move, they talk, they watch what you are doing. And they are capable of Text-To-Speech.

Imagine this scenario:

I purchase an avatar (customized to my liking) with Text-To-Speech option from OddCast. I set up that Avatar to read a particular text file from my web server’s file system whenever a person views my homepage.
I then set up an application in which my daily activities, schedule, etc are stuck into a database. I add to that an API calls to Digg, Technorati, flickr, and delicious to pickup my online activity for the day.
I write some logic to figure out what’s important, what’s current, and what’s relevant – pretty easy to do with timestamps and importance fields in the DB.
I create a job that writes the text file that the avatar will read, I set it to update every 15 minutes.
Now, whenever anyone visits my site, they will be greeted by me and I will be able to share with them what’s going on in my life right now. The ultimate personal greeting.

But this scenario is just the beginning. Ray Kurzweil’s avatar “Ramona” can answer questions. Thus, when the tools to consume natural language become more ubiquitous, I too will be able to easily setup a database of my life, my writings, my pictures, my video’s, etc and serve it all up through my avatar.

Avatars are becoming programmable. They will soon be our programmable agents, just as the answering machine is today.