Types of VH


In the book, and particularly Chapters 1 and 8, we describe some of the different types of/roles for virtual humans that exist now and which are likely to evolve in the future. The types/roles we describe are:

  • Intelligent Speaker - Alexa and even Siri type systems
  • Customer Service Chatbot - as found on many web sites, we’d even include health information bots here
  • Virtual Assistant - where things like Siri are headed, your own virtual PA
  • Virtual Tutor - helping you to learn, not replacing a teacher but augmenting them, teaching the basics so that the human can focus on the more interesting bits
  • Virtual Non-Player Character (NPC) - what we find in games, may be detailed, complex foreground characters, or virtual background artists and extras
  • Virtual Life Coach - helping you to develop as a person and deal with life’s challenges and problems
  • Virtual Expert - a source of knowledge and expertise on a particular topic, may be more unstructured than the traditional “expert system”
  • Virtual Persona - a virtual copy of a specific real person
  • Virtual Person - a virtual human that seems to be a real person, and/or based on one, but is actually completely “artificial”
  • Digital Immortal - what happens when the model for a virtual persona dies and the virtual persona itself lives on, not just as a passive chatbot, but as an active participant in global life

We’ll start linking into examples of each in the blog, and possibly consolidate the best examples here.