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.