Animated Candidates Replay the Debates Online
PC Magazine, October 20, 2004
By Sebastian Rupley

Didn't catch the Bush-Kerry debates? Or did you miss some of them? If so, you can replay the audio from them, complete with pull-down pick lists that let you jump to certain topics, such as "Increasing Homeland Security" online. The cutesy added catch is that online, animated avatars of Bush and Kerry speak and move expressively, giving the replays a television-style feel.

The debates archives and the accompanying avatars were put together by ElectionMall Technologies and Oddcast. Oddcast specializes in allowing businesses to animate talking avatars online for advertising purposes. Its customers include Coca-Cola, Gillette and Burger King.

The Bush and Kerry avatars will move their heads and eyes to follow your mouse arrow as you make selections from the online pick lists. When you select a topic, the actual question that the debate moderator asked appears as text at the bottom of the screen, and when you click on a "Hear Bush" or "Hear Kerry" button, the audio responses from the debates will play. Thus far, the complete audio transcripts of the first two debates are available to replay, and the third debate's content will be available by the end of the week, according to Oddcast.

"We're also going to leave these debate archives up after the election is over," says Adi Sideman, CEO and founder of Oddcast. "The idea is to form historical records on the Web so people can go back through the debates."

Sideman says that the toughest part of putting together the application was doing all the audio editing so users can jump to various parts of the debates. The integration with the animated avatars was built automatically by Oddcast's software.

Oddcast also makes available a service called SitePal (http://www.sitepal.com), which lets you build your own talking avatars for online applications. Fees start at $10 a month, and several sellers at eBay make use of the talking avatars to promote their products. For another spin on avatar technology, you can play online sports trivia games with more of Oddcast's talking characters through ESPN's Trivia Link at http://trivia.oddcast.com/espn.