The White Coat of the Nerves: How to Protect the Speed of Your Thoughts
Have you ever wondered how a thought travels from your brain to your finger in less than a blink of an eye? It is not magic. It is biology. Inside our body, there are tiny wires called nerves. But these wires are not bare. They are covered by a special protective layer. This layer is white and fatty. We call it myelin.
Imagine an electrical wire in your house. If the plastic coating is damaged, the electricity leaks. The light flickers. (more…)
The Weight of Days: How Streaks and Daily Habits Shape Our Digital Lives
The Nature of Habit in the Modern Age
In the vast expanse of our contemporary existence, we find ourselves bound by invisible threads of routine that govern our waking hours and our moments of rest. It is a known truth among the scholars of human behavior that the mind seeks comfort in repetition, for the unknown brings forth anxiety while the familiar offers a sanctuary of peace. When we speak of the digital applications that occupy the glowing rectangles in our palms, we are not merely discussing tools of utility, but rather the architects of our daily rhythms. (more…)
The Simple Path to Natural Hydration: Crafting Your Own Electrolyte Elixir
In our fast-paced world filled with brightly colored bottles promising peak performance and instant refreshment, we often overlook the profound wisdom found in nature’s simplest ingredients. There exists a beautiful truth that the most effective solutions for our wellbeing frequently come from sources that have nourished humanity for generations. When it comes to maintaining proper hydration especially during warm weather, intense movement, or times when our bodies lose precious fluids, the answer might be sitting right in your kitchen pantry and refrigerator. (more…)
The Unseen Arena: How Community Sports Debate Workshops Forge Stronger Towns and Sharper Minds
You know, folks, I’ve spent decades reading tells across a poker table—the micro-expressions, the chip shuffles, the subtle shifts in breathing that reveal an opponent’s hand. But let me tell you, the most revealing tells I’ve ever witnessed aren’t in a casino; they’re in community centers, libraries, and school gyms where everyday people gather not to gamble, but totalk. Specifically, I’m talking about community sports debate workshops. (more…)
The Heart’s Call to the Sea: How Ferry Rides to Island Sanctuaries Nourish Your Deepest Well-Being
There’s a quiet magic that unfolds the moment you step onto a sun-warmed ferry deck, the mainland shrinking behind you as the water stretches wide and welcoming. In our bustling lives, where screens glow late into the night and the rhythm of urgency pulses through every hour, these simple journeys across the water offer something profoundly restorative—not just for the mind, but for the very core of our being. (more…)
Chatbots are popping up everywhere. They are being used on the sites of a huge range of industries. They provide automated customer support, saving the business time, money, and resources. But as more and more people are using chatbots, people are now becoming to expect more of them. They want more in depth answers, they want a personalised service and an emotional response, almost as though they are talking to a real person.
One application of the ARIA-VALUSPA project is creating embodied chatbots. These are much more than just a simple virtual assistant, they also incorporate social aspects into their interaction with customers, offering an adequate shopping solution. In essence, they have the ability to reproduce the characteristics that a conversation with another human being would have.
For some people this may seem a bit futuristic, but it is already happening. Today, chatbots can do a lot more than answering simple questions with set answers. Nordstrom introduced a bot into their customer service department at the end of 2016, and it’s been very well received by their clientele. An intelligent bot can interact proactively and change the way it interacts, depending on the person it is talking with. It is clear that this technology has developed into a fully fledged marketing tool that can help to represent a brand.
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Although it is common knowledge that this is a growing market, how big is it really? In terms of market size growth worldwide, in 2015 it was worth around $113m, just one year later this was up to $703.3m. By 2025 the global chatbot market is expected to reach $1.23 billion, which is an annual growth rate of 24.3%.
Therefore, it is not only the intelligence and capabilities of chatbots that are growing, but also their reach worldwide. It is predicted that more than 25% of the world’s population will be using mobile messaging apps by 2019. An inventor, Ray Kurzeweil, claims that they will be indistinguishable from humans by 2029!
Link to the infographic https://www.16best.net/blog/chatbots-gone-wild/
Conquering The World - Chatbots Gone Wild (2018 Infographic)
www.16best.net
The number of brands and merchants using chat bots is ever-increasing. This infographic outlines a multitude of predictions and fun facts as to the chat bots' upcoming development.
The final report containing the major scientific impact of the and ARIA-Valuspa project is now available. We are happy to announce that the ARIA-Valuspa project achieved an excellent rating and for its major scientific breakthroughs. The public version of the report can be found here.
As part of the demonstrators build for ARIA-VALUSPA’s final review to the European Commission, we developed the capability of running the ARIA-VALUSPA Platform in Unity3D. This allows you to create and place AVP characters in any game environment, and use appearances and backgrounds from huge existing libraries. Here are two example videos of how you could use this:
Unity is an industry standard 3D environment development engine from Unity Technologies. The most recently released figures from 2015 suggested 4.5 Million registered developers with 1 million monthly active users. While there are other well-known engines, such as Unreal, Unity is considered the de facto standard, especially amongst academics and indie developers due to its low cost, and the significant community support. It also accounts for some 47% of all mobile game development. As a cross-platform development environment for 3D work, unity is currently peerless. It supports native building for: iOS, Android, Tizen, Windows, Universal Windows Platform, Mac, Linux, WebGL, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, Wii U, 3DS, Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, Steam VR, Playstation VR, Gear VR, Windows Mixed Reality, Daydream, Android TV, Samsung Smart TV, tvOS, Nintendo Switch, Fire OS, Facebook Gameroom, Apple ARKit, Google ARCore, and Vuforia. Unity allows developers to create AAA standard environments and interactions: from large, complex 3D environments with casts of thousands, to the simplest 2D games. Unity includes built in pipeline support for a range of interaction modalities including AR and VR.
Unity is the ultimate game development platform. Use Unity to build high-quality 3D and 2D games, deploy them across mobile, desktop, VR/AR, consoles or the Web, and …
One relevant feature is the facility to create, animate and give life to virtual characters, however the realism of these characters is limited by standard method and the tools currently available. GRETA, by allowing remote manipulations of character animation (including lip syncing) allows far more complex agents to be delivered into the unity system. A key challenge was integrating GRETA’s animation system with unity’s own built in mechanim system. Doing this allows characters to be animated ‘normally’ using well established methods, then have these animations overridden by GRETA when necessary. The separation of FAP and BAP makes this comparatively straightforward, allowing choices to be made about how to animate bodies, while allowing GRETA to effectively handle facial animations. For gestures, it is possible to choose between GRETA and Mechanim control, if the developer wishes to implement his/her own gestures based on incoming FML Data. This is particularly preferable if the character is ‘doing’ something and we still wish to interact with them. Currently the platform only handles one specific skeleton structure (those generated by autodesk character creator), though the intention is to release an updated version which will allow bone mapping, to handle any “humanoid” bone setup. This is inline with unity’s current mechanim model.
The pipeline is as follows: Unity picks up FML from whatever source (e.g. AVP). An instance of GRETA (either on the same machine or over a network) runs a series of thrift servers. Unity passes the FML to GRETA and receives FAP/BAP and audio in return. These are then used to drive the character animation and audio.
The support for Unity3D is scheduled for the 3.0.1 release of AVP, due by the end of April 2018.
We are happy to announce that the ARIA Valuspa Platform is now released in Version 3.0. You can download it at https://github.com/ARIA-VALUSPA/AVP. The AVP 3.0 comes with major improvements and new features, as well as an easier installation process.
The core of the Aria platform (SSI recognition pipeline including Emax, Opensmile, Cerevoice) is used on a social social to replicate the Aria scenario (Alice in Wonderland). In addition, the demo features reinforcement learning and natural language generation to adapt the robot’s linguistic style to the user’s personality preferences. For more details see: Hannes Ritschel, Tobias Baur, Elisabeth André: Adapting a Robot’s linguistic style based on socially-aware reinforcement learning. RO-MAN 2017: 378-384. Want to create your own Human-Agent Scenarios? Check out the Aria Valuspa Platform on https://github.com/ARIA-VALUSPA/AVP
