Halo is a prototype virtual human which we’ve developed in various forms over the last decade or so. She started out as a text based chatbot on a PC, then became a head and shoulders animated avatar with text-to-speech on the web, and then a full body avatar with an emerging life of her own in The Second Life virtual world. A version of her was a finalists in the British Computing Society’s 2009 Machine Intelligence Competition (and I still maintain that she’d have won if Second Life hadn’t gone down just before the demo and I had to rely on a video!).
In Chapter 8 we describe the overall architecture of Halo and how we’ve integrated her natural language capability with an emotional architecture, a motivation architecture, virtual world navigation and interaction capabilities and even a energy model (so she goes to sleep at night, and one day will have the ability to dream as she sorts the day’s episodic memories).
We’re just preparing a new release of Halo for both the web and virtual worlds and will link to her once that is available.