Take 1: Voki Avatars

Released quite recently by Oddcast, Voki is a free animated avatar designed to assist with more “personal” uses rather than its corporate sister, Sitepal. I recently stumbled on this site/software through another corporation’s site I visited; although it could be annoying sometimes, Voki is definitely an interesting web software.

Voki was first designed to appeal to bloggers and myspace users. As I just mentioned already, it is supposed to be used on only personal websites (which Herb’s Blurbs is, technically speaking); if you are a corporate customer you might want to consider investing $10/month into its more sophisticated sister Sitepal.

I would describe Voki as an animated avatar – although it is so much more. I could describe it as a welcomer, a website guide, but oh well. Voki’s actually not too hard to use – although I think it’s much better to simply register for it in order to save your Voki avatar. It’s got a pretty numerable variety of features – everything that I expected to have; and a bit more.

Well, to start off, you can customize your Voki character; there are a myriad of options for you to choose between! From more “classic” humans to “random” animals, you can decide on what character to use – of course, you should take into consideration the appropriateness of the situation. The character’s heads are also very changeable – from height, to length, to nose size, and mouth size (and colour), there are all sorts of variations. You can choose to dress him/her/it into the funkiest of clothes, although I do think the choices might be a bit limited, Voki is still in it’s Alpha stage.

After the character customization, the most interesting part – making it talk. You can import a preloaded .mp3 file, record using a mic live, type up what you want the character to say, or (for all who don’t have microphones and hate the preloaded voices like I did), you can call in by telephone to record your voice which is a feature I think is amazing. I first tried typing what I wanted my Voki to say, but unfortunately, the voices are very mechanical (to say the least). They are also limited to very regular words, and couldn’t say the word “blog” for example. So, I decided on recording live; I don’t really have a sound studio, so I saw no point in recording a .mp3 first. The recording was easy, but it had a limit of sixty seconds which should be more than enough to welcome your guests. But, don’t expect to tell a (long) story with the Voki (by voice anyway). According to a friend, the Voki service took longer than expected to upload a .mp3 file – presumably, a song. I can say that’s kind of disappointing to hear, but there will be plenty of time to remedy these changes. I have not tried the telephone service yet, but I do think I can safely assume that it’s pretty similar to the mic-recording experience but perhaps with no time limit (or a longer one).

Then, the more minor changes; the third stage requires you choose a background. This can be an uploaded background from your computer, or one of the included default ones. There is a decently-sized selection of a variety of different backgrounds to choose from – there are also (interestingly enough), animated backgrounds.

The last option is to customize your player; the border surrounding your avatar. This really disappointed me – even though I had expected less professional options, I could only choose one that looked halfway decent. The rest are very useful, but only for personal uses. There are a lot of selections that are quite comical, but we are here to make a tech statement, not to milk a cow!

The most unexpected part; the mouth movements are synchronized to the speech! I think it’s pretty amazing what the Voki avatar can accomplish – it actually seems halfway realistic (well, for an animation).

Overall, I think Voki avatars will be an excellent selection to the internet – especially for personal use. As for me – I’m not sure whether or not I will use it yet…perhaps in the near future. It’s not that I don’t like it, because I really do, but I’m just not sure whether it belongs to my blog. If you’re looking for a way to greet your web site’s visitors though, I suggest you take a look at Voki avatars. I would post an example of an avatar I created in the same post, but there were some layout issues which I had to fix. It will be in the post below this one!