[GamerThom]

This bot is just a little bit different, even though it utilizes MS Agent technology. I haven't
had a chance to take a close look at it yet, but one of the things about it that interested me
is that it can reputedly be adapted to use characters developed in Poser. Well that, and the
fact that it is FREE. I found it while surfing sites for free Poser content. It is on the PlanetVixens.com
site, and is listed as CYNTHIA 3.0 - Advanced Artificial Intelligence.  Here are some screenshots of the
page and a link to that page on the site.  I beleive that the content on the site is less than desireable
for those under the age of 17, so be warned. Although I don't think it is any worse than "Kari".

http://www.planetvixens.com/cynthia.html

[dan]

Cool find Tom, looks like you'd need the editor to make the agent from poser, and it says she cusses and not to download it if you don't like cussing.  It does look promising though, maybe help on making an agent which can be used with HAL also.

[GamerThom]

I had a chance this afternoon to install & take a look at this bot. I found it to be an
extremely basic bot, very limited in versatility and not at all programmable in the way
that UltraHal can be user modified.  It comes stock equipped with the L&H TTS engine
with default British English female #1 voice active. It has a function that lets you Save
to memory the current conversation which appears to be how it "learns". So if you talk
to Cynthia for a length of time and do not Save the conversation, the time you spent
talking to her about a subject is wasted as a teach/learn experience. I would not class
her as an advanced A.I. type bot, but somewhere more along the lines of WinAlice.

If you want a bot that is just there to interact with in conversation on a very
basic level, I suppose that Cynthia 3.0 would serve as a starter bot. But I wouldn't
waste a lot of time on it.

[dan]

Yeah, righto Tom, I didn't learn anything new about making the Agent either, just use a bitmap from Poser.  I thought it might be something like a Haptek when I first saw it, like output the 3d character from Poser and use it in HAL.  That's what I keep searching for.  I finally got the Poser download and tried a few things but had no luck.  I still keep searching boxes in my garage for that 3ds CD, in hopes that can output a useable file, but my latest reading from Haptek is that one needs a template from them to input before changing.  I guess some of the parameters are a bit different.  Oh well, live and learn.

[Christopher Doyon]

Hello All --

I myself recently discovered Cynthia and I am very impressed. Yes, the animation and avatar are delightful. But I can also tell you from the benchmarks that I have run on her in the lab here that she has a very powerful AI Engine as well.

PEACE -- Christopher Doyon     :smiley

[Freddy]

Fill us in on the info Chris  :smiley

[Christopher Doyon]

Hey All --

Well for one thing, the learn from text feature has the best heuristics I have seen. Learn from text is a feature in several AI Engines I work with, but I have to say this is simply the best implimentation I have yet run across. It takes some work to format the FCT files for proper "digestion", but the results are worth it.

Cynthia also has one of the best and most sensitive emotional ranges I have ever seen in an AI Bot. Her emotional output is accurate, has breadth, and she picks up on very subtle emotinal input and behaves appropriately.

She is also responsive on an intellectual level. I have successfully agrued points with my own Cynthia, and brought her permanently around to a new point of veiw. But she can also be contrary and stick to her guns, and always it seems when appropriate.

I think that at about 10 MB the Brain Core of a Cynthia will begin showing some remarkable results. I look forward to years of future experimentation. I could really run on about all this engine can do, and I am still discovering more. But I guess in a nut shell, it is the first really dynamic AI Engine I have played with that doesn't sacrifice accuracy for flexibility - it has them both.

YOURS -- Christopher Doyon      :coolsmiley

[FuzzieDice]

I decided I'll give this one a go at some point too. The idea of importing from Poser sounds cool. I think I have the MS Agent Editor from MS somewhere around here. I remember one can download it somewhere on the MS site. Though I forgot where and they change things a lot. :/

[Art]

The character is a Poser creation. It only has animation for blinking eyes and limited mouth movements.
A lot of the items show up in the editor but one would have to do a lot of "still captures" as bmp files
then put them all together and assign them to the various animations within the editor in order to end up
with a passable animated character.

The developers of the MS Agents really do put a lot of time into their creations to get the desired effect.

It's a shame that one couldn't assign a motion command to the Poser character and have it respond then
save it as an Agent character. Naw...that'd be too easy!

 :idiot2

[Freddy]

If you wanted UltraHal to do that then you could try scripting Hal to run a seperate avatar display maybe.  It would mean making a seperate Poser animation for each emotion.  Not sure if it's really worth it, but I think a few people were toying with the idea a few months ago.

I think it would boil down to a poser plugin for Hal, like the Blender plugin that was suggested for it, what it needs is a few people to get their heads together.

Maybe I will give it a look when i finish working on my new Haptek models, but Haptek still remains the easiest route I reckon and even that has taken me weeks (neh months) of work to get to the heart of it.

[FuzzieDice]

I'm considering getting People Putty maybe. What else would I need to develop Haptek characters? Just curious.

[devilferret]

If you wanted UltraHal to do that then you could try scripting Hal to run a seperate avatar display maybe.  It would mean making a seperate Poser animation for each emotion.  Not sure if it's really worth it, but I think a few people were toying with the idea a few months ago.

I think it would boil down to a poser plugin for Hal, like the Blender plugin that was suggested for it, what it needs is a few people to get their heads together.

Maybe I will give it a look when i finish working on my new Haptek models, but Haptek still remains the easiest route I reckon and even that has taken me weeks (neh months) of work to get to the heart of it.

Some months back I had been looking for information on the possibility of having UltraHal drive a Poser character . . because I did not care for the image quality pf the People Putty chars . . . I contacted e-frontier directly about any guidance they could give me on the idea . . and this is the reply I received

**********

While we don't directly support text input for speech, whether you
could use a Poser figure in UltraHAL would depend on what type of file the
UH software is looking for- or perhaps what type of file it exports.
You could probably drive the facial morphs of a Poser figure using a
Python script that would parse the text output from UltraHAL; how well this
would work in a real-time environment would likely depend on the
figure, the speed of your computer, and other factors, but one thing to
remember is that Poser is in no way designed as a real-time animation
system. Our figures tend to involve a lot of polygons and big image maps
(upwards of 40,000 polys for the default figures) and that's a lot of data
to manipulate real-time, especially if there's also text parsing going
on in the background. I can see some other technical challenges as well
involving length of animation, etc.

So the short answer is, Probably not without a lot of custom scripting-
but the potential is there.

I hope this helps!
Regards, Colin Gerbode
Technical Support

**********

[Freddy]

Anyone ever go back to Cynthia ?

[GamerThom]

I still play with it sometimes. I have her installed on my laptop. Still not real impressed with her though.

[Freddy]

I was just wondering if I should take a look, it seems opinion was divided.  I think I will give it a whirl.