Talking avatar is a virtual character that speaks on behalf of an organization or individual. They can present video presentations, answer customer inquiries, perform tutorials on electronic devices or even solve math problems for students. They are becoming more and more popular as people prefer to watch videos over written content.
It is known that people are highly sensitive to the social cues exhibited by human beings, including facial expressions, eye contact, and voice tone. When they visit a website or shop online, their main objective is to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity in order to build trust. Talking avatars resemble human faces and have human voices, which may help to facilitate the perception of social presence. Empirical studies have shown that talking avatars can increase the experience of social presence and promote the credibility of information on websites.
Using a third-party web service provider, it is easy to implement non-interactive talking avatars on the Internet without any programming knowledge. However, interactivity capabilities in talking avatars require more technical expertise and monetary costs.
The software available for creating talking avatars is quite extensive and allows users to choose different visual styles, voice and lip-sync options, and animation effects. The program Adobe Character Animator, for example, offers many templates to make the process of designing an avatar easier and faster for users. It also offers a variety of features such as face swapping and text to speech in multiple languages. Moreover, it can create high-quality animation videos at a lower cost than other professional programs. talking avatar