Max Headroom two decades ago captured the imaginations of millions with his energy and the concept of an artificial intelligence (AI) able to communicate and interact with humans. Now we can use technological improvements in AI and computer graphics for movies and games to create an AI character that can be realistically driven by responses to spoken questions and interact with people in a realistic fashion. The Virtual Iconic Presence can be tailored by software and training to represent a wide range of religious, cultural and ethnographic qualities, creating interactive Icons with personality, mannerisms and attributes associated with geographic regions, political movements or ethnic populations. This combines techniques from animation, voice recognition, AI, and real time video graphics to create an interactive artificially intelligent virtual presence to support training and mission rehearsal/experimentation areas within the DoD. Tailoring features and speech makes our solution applicable to both training and delivering a message. This same technology could be used for educational purposes. Medical information is better received and retained by being delivered by a face, rather than written instructions especially if the talking head can answer questions.
Keywords: Avatar, Artificial Intelligence, Speech Recognition
