Text Technology Adds Animated Face & Emotions To Your Text Messages

If you have experienced a close friendship or even a romantic relationship with someone online, you know that even though technology has progressed enough to make communication across the globe easy, it still has its limitations. There are so many aspects of a human being’s personality and feelings that sometimes text just can’t express what we want to say or how we’re feeling. There is a new text technology, which involves an animated talking head, which aims to fix this when it comes to our text messages.

The brilliant people at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering and Toshiba’s Cambridge Research Lab have created the talking head you see below named Zoe. This text technology would allow you to express emotions and change voice inflection depending on what emotions you want to express. Since the majority of communication is non-verbal, this could allow text messaging to reach a whole new level of authenticity and realism.

Right now, when you want to send a virtual hug to someone, you probably type the word “hugs” with some sort of characters around it. Imagine being able to add more feeling to that sentiment in a text message. Imagine a virtual hug feeling almost like a real hug, only in a text kind of way. This new text technology could be what finally makes that happen. It could pave the way for a new era of human-computer interaction.

Currently this new text technology is in the beginning stages. What that means is that Zoe’s voice still sounds robotic, and the only animated head option is Zoe’s head. However, in the near future, all that will hopefully change. The voice will sound a little less Siri and a little more human. Also, the goal is that you’ll be able to upload your own head, so the head talking and expressing all these phrases and emotions would be yours. Watch the video below and be amazed!