7 Steps to VIP Status

How to create, animate and deploy your own Virtual Interactive Personalities

This article explains how Rapport makes it easy to combine all of the building blocks necessary to create, animate, and deploy your own Virtual Interactive Personality (VIP).

“But what is a VIP?” 

You may have heard them referred to as “avatars” or “digital humans”. But avatars are technically representations of real people, and digital humans are by definition, human in appearance. A VIP can be either, or both, or neither!

The character could be completely fictional, and indeed, non-human. Above all else, Rapport VIPs are different because they possess the ability to recognize and reflect emotion much more readily. This accelerates the sense of connection required to build empathy and trust, leading to better outcomes across learning, sales, and service interactions across a wide range of sectors. 

Customizing your VIP experience with Rapport couldn’t be easier. The platform guides you through the key decisions you need to make to shape the desired outcomes.

CREATE

1. Appearance: Design your character

First, you will need to choose your character (or characters!). Rapport gives you the option to:

• Use our characters: browse our asset store and choose from a range of photo-realistic, or stylized options - human and non-human

• Use your characters: Import your custom-made characters 

• Make new characters: Create a brand new character using one of our easy-to-use integrated partners.

Rapport is integrated with Ready Player Me, Reallusion CC4, and Unreal MetaHuman, making crafting a new VIP a breeze. These tools allow you to fully customize every aspect of your character to fit your brand.

2. Knowledge: Insert a brain

Once you have chosen your character, we can bring it to life using a range of solutions. Rapport can: 

• Feed the platform with responses from your existing chatbot

• Train one of our integrated third-party AI / large language models on your content 

• Import a pre-defined branching dialogue to keep your conversations on track

Rapport is compatible with all major AI providers such as ChatGPT, Azure, and Gemini, and is easily integrated with other chatbots and dialogue solutions. 

These tools enable your character to understand behavior and respond to user interactions in real-time, creating a seamless and immersive experience.

3. Voice: Choose your preferred text-to-speech provider

Once the brain is in place, you will need to choose (or make) a voice to match your character and brand. Rapport integrates with the most cutting-edge text-to-speech (TTS) solutions to give you access to thousands of different pre-made voices in any language.

However, if you can’t find a voice that suits you, we can also clone a voice, or tweak various aspects of the preset voices, to make the perfect sounding voice for your VIP. 

We currently integrate with AWS Polly, Google, Azure, and ElevenLabs but can integrate with other solutions if needed. 

4. Ears / Listening / Comprehension (Automatic Speech Recognition)

To allow your VIP to understand spoken commands, you will need to give it ears using our automatic speech recognition (ASR) plugins. ASR converts spoken language into text, allowing your character to understand speech and engage in natural conversations with users, enhancing interactivity and engagement.

Rapport’s ASR works in any language and we integrate with most major providers including AWS Transcribe, Google, Azure, and OpenAI’s Whisper. 

ANIMATE

5. Displaying and acknowledging emotions 

Once you have put together all the pieces for your character, it is time to transform them into an emotionally intelligent VIP!

Emotions are the language of connection, and being able to display and reflect realistic emotions can help to forge deeper connections with your users. 

Rapport is powered by Speech Graphics’ award-winning facial animation technology that gives characters real-time: 

• Believable facial expressions

• Accurate lip-sync

• Natural gestures

• Emotional detection

Speech Graphics technology has been tried and tested in the video game industry and unlike most audio-driven solutions, uses a detailed muscle map to achieve highly accurate lip-sync. Believable facial expressions, accurate lip-sync, and natural gestures all contribute to animating a character with lifelike precision, creating engaging and immersive experiences. 

However, Speech Graphics technology not only allows Rapport VIPs to display emotions effectively but also to detect the emotions of users and react accordingly, taking human-machine interactions to a new level. VIPs can not only respond with accuracy to queries but also respond with the appropriate tone of voice or emotion. 

6. Environments 

Now your VIP is almost ready but first, you need to pick a suitable setting. Choose from our collection of dynamic backgrounds. Whether it's a corporate office environment, tranquil nature scene, or futuristic landscape, our diverse range of environments sets the stage for endless storytelling possibilities.

DEPLOY

7. Deploy Anywhere

Once your VIP is ready to meet the world, Rapport makes deployment easy. It is modular, configurable, and deployable anywhere: on the web, on device, in app, or in a game engine, like Unity or Unreal. Our platform offers seamless deployment options for maximum accessibility and reach.

Conclusion

Rapport provides you with the powerful tools you need to create, animate, and deploy emotionally intelligent VIPs. Whether you're looking to enhance customer interactions, tell compelling stories, or simply engage with your audience in a whole new way, Rapport empowers you to revolutionize the way you connect in the digital realm. Get in contact with us to start your VIP journey today.