Loading...You must have seen those flash ads on some sites with an avatar speaking the words from the advertiser and responding to the mouse movements as you move it along. Well such kind of ads seem quite impressive and eye-catching. Even if you aren’t an advertiser, you may want to make such talking lively avatars to give some cool message to your blog readers or send to your friends. You can create a Flash widget with such avatars in a snap without using Flash. Voki helps you do it.
You can create a Voki without logging in but if you want to save them, you must sign up. Signing up is easy and once you click on the validation link, you’re done. Click on the “create” link at the top of the page to bring up the Avatar customizer. The whole set of tools will let you choose from a number of characters, customize their clothing, change backgrounds and much more.
Under the “Customize your character” section, you will find buttons for choosing the face for your character, their clothing and eyewear. Under the head section, you can choose the face, hairstyle and lips. Under clothing, you can choose the upper outfit and cap. In the “bling” section, you can choose goggles and necklace. Once you think your character looks cool with all the accessories, click “Done”.
Now, give it a voice. You’ll have four options for adding voice to your avatar. You can add voice from Phone, record from a microphone, upload a pre-existing audio file or just use a very precise text to speech converter. Well the text to speech converter seemed the easiest to use. But the downside is that it only lets you input 160 characters at maximum. You can also adjust the type of voice and add sound effects to it. Isn’t that great?
You can click on the play button anytime and see how your avatar speaks. Just below the player, you will see some features to tweak your character. Like you can adjust the colors mouth, makeup, eyes, skin and hair by playing around with the color sliders. Or you can make your character look totally different by changing the dimensions of their mouth, nose, body, height and width. Just play around with them to make your avatar look coolest.
The backgrounds tab will let you select a background for your movie from a list of cool ones. If you don’t like any of them, you can also user your own background by uploading. And the players button will let you select the player for your Flash movie. Finally click on the publish button to publish your Flash movie with your speaking avatar. I created one just to show you how it looks like.