A Java 3D Talking Head for a Chatbot

Abstract

Facial animation is referred to all those systems per- forming the speech synchronization with an animated face model. This kind of systems are called ”Talking Head” or ”Talking Face”. In this paper a Talking Head oriented to the creation of a Chatbot is presented. It requires an in- put query and an answer is generated in form of text. The answer is transduced into a facial animation using a 3D face model whose lips movements are synchronized with the sound produced by a speech synthesis module. Our ”Talk- ing Head” explores the naturalness of the facial animation and provides a real-time interactive interface to the user. The WEB infrastructure has been realized using the Client- Server model delegating the Chatbot, the Natural Language Processing and the Digital Signal Processing services to the server, while the client is involved in animation, syn- chronization; in this way, the server can handle multiple requests from clients.