"May I talk to you? : -) " - facial animation from text

We introduce a facial animation system that produces real-time animation sequences including speech synchronization and non-verbal speech-related facial expressions from plain text input. A state-of-the-art text-to-speech synthesis component performs linguistic analysis of the text input and creates a speech signal from phonetic and intonation information. The phonetic transcription is additionally used to drive a speech synchronization method for the physically based facial animation. Further high-level information from the linguistic analysis such as different types of accents or pauses as well as the type of the sentence is used to generate non-verbal speech-related facial expressions such as movement of head, eyes, and eyebrows or voluntary eye blinks. Moreover, emotions are translated into XML markup that triggers emotional facial expressions.