Speaking Animation

Supply mouth images for each animation during which you want the character to be able to speak, unless your character's design has no animated mouth or indication of spoken output. In general, mouth movement is very important. A character may appear less intelligent, likable, or honest if its mouth movement is not reasonably synced with its speech. Mouth images allow your character to lip-sync to spoken output. You define mouth images separately and as Windows bitmap files. They must match the same color palette as the other images in your animation.

The Microsoft Agent animation services display mouth animation frames on top of the last frame of an animation, also called the speaking frame of the animation. For example, when the character speaks in the GestureRight animation, the animation services overlay the mouth animation frames on the last frame of GestureRight. A character cannot speak while animating, so you only supply mouth images for only the last frame of an animation. In addition, the speaking frame must be the end frame of an animation, so a character cannot speak in a looping animation.

Typically, you would supply the mouth images in the same size as the frame (and base image), but include only the area that animates as part of the mouth movement, and render the rest of the image in the transparent color. Design the image so that it matches the image in the speaking frame when overlaid on top of it. To have it match correctly, it is likely you'll need to create a separate set of mouth images for every animation in which the character speaks.

A mouth image can include more than the mouth itself, such as the chin or other parts of the character's body while it speaks. However, if you move a hand or leg, note that it may appear to move randomly because the mouth overlay displayed will be based on the current phoneme of a spoken phrase. In addition, the server clips the mouth image to the speaking frame image's outline. Design your mouth overlay image to remain within the outline of its base speaking frame image, because the server uses the base image to create the window boundary for the character.

The Microsoft Agent Character Editor enables you to define seven basic mouth positions that correspond to common phoneme mouth shapes shown in the following table:

Mouth Animation Images

Mouth Position	Sample Image	Representation
Closed		Normal mouth closed shape. Also used for phonemes such as "m" as in "mom," "b" as in "bob," "f" as in "fife."
Open-wide 1		Mouth is slightly open, at full width. Used for phonemes such as "g" as in "gag," "l" as in "lull," "ear" as in "hear."
Open-wide 2		Mouth is partially open, at full width. Used for phonemes such as "n" as in "nun," "d" as in "dad," "t" as in "tot."
Open-wide 3		Mouth is open, at full width. Used for phonemes such as "u" as in "hut," "ea" as in "head," "ur" as in "hurt."
Open-wide 4		Mouth is completely open, at full width. Used for phonemes such as "a" as in "hat," "ow" as in "how."
Open-medium		Mouth is open at half width. Used for phonemes such as "oy" as in "ahoy," "o" as in "hot."
Open-narrow		Mouth is open at narrow width. Used for phonemes such as "o" as in "hoop", "o" as in "hope," "w" as in "wet."