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And now - Voki’fy your MySpace profile
By Vivek | May 9th, 2007 at 10:01 am ET
Avatars are fun. Talking avatars are even better. When these talking avatars get social, it gets even better. NY based Oddcast today delivered the last piece with the launch of Voki. Till date Oddcast has been into developing avatar platform that provides very effective personalization options for businesses and online communications. Sitepal is just one of the products available from Oddcast.
The new product Voki is targeted at social side of life. Users can create a talking character and add their own voice to finally embed the creation on their blog. Customization options include ability to make the avatar look like you or an animal, or monster, or anime, or whatever. To add voice, you can speak through your mic, or call Voki, or just upload text to get it automatically converted to text.
Since the service just launched, it seems to be experiencing few hiccups. It’s been half-hour since I registered at Voki, and I have yet to receive the account confirmation email.
Still, looking at the creations from users the product seems pretty comprehensive. Scroll down on cancelwinter’s profile on MySpace to checkout the embedded Voki. Only negatives earned by Voki - commenting on a Voki requires registration 
I think Voki can hit the viral distribution path pretty soon.
Links:
Voki
on May 9th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Hey… Thanks for checking us out.
So, first, we’ll look into where your confirmation e-mail went. Can you e-mail me at charlie@oddcast.com and we’ll look into it?
Two, you don’t need to register to comment… it only looks that way because the username and password box appears, but we never ask anything that says, “Got an account? Create a Voki” so its obvious you don’t actually need one.
on May 9th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Ah, you got me on that. Lesson learned: never confuse your user
on June 28th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
[…] Intelligent avatars are coming to town. Okay, no need to run away just now since the service is in private-beta and after all they are just avatars. So, who is the new one on the block after Gizmoz and Sitepal/Voki? It is Skaaz from France based company Virtuoz. Although I don’t have much details as to what all is going to be offered since the site in French, but what I could gather from other sources is that Skaaz will be a fully customizable avatar with auto reply kind of facilities when you are away from your machine or wherever the bot is embedded. As you might expect Skaaz will bling to MySpace and likes including IM tools like MSN Messenger. The company will be looking to make money the old way - customize your avatar. Tags: […]
on July 5th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
[…] Pricing and features aside, how many users will be looking to do just that - talking into a webcam and putting it on a website. Especially when you have services like Sitepal/Voki, Virtuoz/Skaaz, or one of the more fun services Gizmoz that let you easily add voice to an avatar and place the embed code on a site you want. […]
on July 5th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
[…] Voki - create an animated avatar for your blog that will greet your blog visitors, see more. Other ways are an audio greeting from jaxtr, evoca or even bubbleguru [via SUS] […]
on July 20th, 2007 at 12:24 am
I would like to see avatars that are controlled in real time by video cameras and software that determine your position and facoa; expression and make the avatar move and emote accordingly, and which accept either typed input that’s converted into sound, or that in essence listens to what you say, sing, hum, whistle, etc. and says it or sings it or hums or whistle’s it in someone else’s voice. Not just a voice altering program, but something that uses a synthetic voice totally separate from your own, to say the same things, with proper emotion and inflection. And it should sing on key.