Make a Blog or Website More Interactive with Animated Speaking Character

When I started to make my blog a little more personal, I came across a company who seemed to be offering a service of publishing animated characters in combination with voice into a website called Sitepal.com. They offer a free trial service so I can get comfortable with creating animated characters and evaluate the value of the service for my blog.

SitePal lets me easily create and add an animated speaking character to my blog, Flash application, email, PowerPoint, or eBay auction, making it more personal and persuasive.

How to Create a Speaking Character
There are just a few steps to make animated speaking characters really work in a blog or website. The Sitepal’s online interface for setting up the character is excellent – very simple to use; I can try a demo of the customization interface on the Sitepal web site. Try to create your own character here.

Below is an example of Sitepal’s created speaking character.

Features
SitePal provides a number of powerful, yet easy-to-use features for designing, scripting and publishing  animated speaking characters.

• Model. SitePal provides a full range of 2D and 3D style speaking character model options to meet the needs of any kind of business website.
• Audio. SitePal offers 5 different means for you to add audio to your site. Update messages as often as you’d like at no additional cost. You can also allow your site visitors to control your talking character’s speech by adding play, mute and volume conrtols. Lip syncing is automatic!
• Publishing. SitePal’s online publishing wizard lets you easily add your SitePal talking avatars virtually anywhere: on your web site or blog, in an e-mail, in a Flash or PowerPoint presentation. SitePal is fully compatible with all hosting providers & web server technologies and languages. (e.g. Yahoo sitebuilder, 360 GoDaddy, Bravenet, Web.com and iWeb)
• Functional Players. Make your speaking character carry specific business tasks on your website such as collecting leads or answering FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). Using its built-in player feature, it’s quick and easy to add these solutions.

Advantages of Putting Speaking Characters into a Blog or Website
Not only is it a great way of conveying your message to the visually impaired, but it could also be of benefit to those who don’t like reading, have poor reading skills or are illiterate.

Although the characters are merely cartoon animations, I feel that their presence also gets around the issues of a disembodied voice playing – it gives people something that’s related to look at; delivering the message more effectively.

Using a voice recording also allows people to move away from their computer and attend to something else while listening to the message

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