Using speech for calls to action, sales, inf, etc..

..anyone doing it?

[blaze]

There are some businesses which are offering avatars that you can paste on your web pages and will actually speak via flash to your customers. They have pretty good AI txt to speech and you can get professional recordings which the avatars will lip synch to.

Is anyone doing this? I am seriously considering experimenting with this as the cost is pretty low ($15/month).

[edited by: blaze at 1:12 pm (utc) on June 26, 2004]

[eWhisper]

I think this was first offered through MS roughly 3 years ago. They were based off some of the office assistants, and it started with 5 different avatars.

They were complicated to install and run at the time, and never took off. I only knew of a few sites that ran them, and they were generally very high tech web devs, but I also think they were slow in developing because of how you had to go about liscensing them.

I see them every once in a while now, and they remind me of the office assitant icons, which just annoy me and I turn off immediately, so I never give them a chance to speak to me.

However, some of the new ones are a bit different, and I think they could be a nice alternative to live chat on a website, or run while your normal chat is offline.

I've not used them yet, but I've thought about it a few different times. I would be interested to hear anyone's experience with them if they've tried them.

[HughMungus]

Blaze, see the link in my profile for an option. It's free.

[danieljean]

What's the ROI on that? I wouldn't be surprised if it was negative...