A Java3D Talking Head for a Chatbot

Facial animation is referred to all those systems performing 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 input 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 "talking 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, synchronization; in this way, the server can handle multiple requests from clients.