Project Summary

SitePal™ is a subscription service that allows people to create a wide-array of talking avatars which can be added to their websites for a variety of professional and personal applications. The Emotional States Editor was one of the more interesting features I worked on while the Product Manager for that product.

This feature enabled the SitePal animated avatar technology to exhibit emotional characteristics based on the content of a given audio message. These expressions included happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and thinking. Emotional States could be added in one of two ways: they could be "recorded" by a user in real-time as an audio track played or they could be visually dragged and dropped onto an audio track's timeline and then edited - e.g. re-positioned, stretched and / or shortened as needed. Since not all avatars were compatible with the Emotional States feature, the user's settings were saved as a special metadata stream that could be ignored without affecting the avatar's other behaviors.

Status

Unknown. This feature never made its way into the basic SitePal product. However, a version of the feature was eventually incorporated into some enterprise-level products for ESL (English as a Second Language) applications released by Oddcast (SitePal's parent company).

My Contributions (as Product Manager)

• Designed the user interface used to assign different facial expressions to a given audio track along a timeline.
• Wrote the functional specification and designed the Emotional State editor as an overlay so it could be added to our existing SitePal editing UI with minimal visual or back-end changes.
• Managed the freelance designer to create a "pretty" look and skin to my interface.