Your Digital Person’s behavior can be adjusted using hashtag gesture markup inserted directly into a corpus. This is a fantastic way to add further fine-tuning to your Digital Person should you require it at some points in your conversation. But remember, if you have Real-Time Gesturing and Behavior Styles enabled, you can take a hands-off approach and let our system do the work for you.
We offer following types of gesture hashtags:
Hand and body gesture markup - These can trigger unique movements of the hand and body that aren't automatically available in real-time gesturing.
Head and face gesture markup - These can trigger specific facial gestures and emphasize emotions in speech.
Insert this markup directly into your corpus to trigger specific gestures below, with a space on either side of the markup. For example:
I truly can't #Bow thank you enough.
I love #HeartSign you so much!
That sounds pretty #ThumbsUpOneHand good to me.
The Hand and body gesture markup is applicable only for Digital People running Human OS 2.5+, and speaking English, Japanese, and Korean.
Head and face gesture markup
For all Digital People we have a range of head and face gesture markup available. Insert this markup directly into your corpus to trigger specific gestures below, with a space on either side of the markup.
These tags are applicable for all Human OS versions and all supported languages.
Sentence markup
Use these tags to add an emotional performance to your entire sentence. For example:
#HappyStrong I am delighted to meet you.
Word markup
Use these tags to add emphasis to a word. For example:
Tilts and Turns #PuncHeadTurnR #PuncHeadTurnL #PuncTiltL #PuncTiltR
Eyes #PuncBlink #PuncEyeNarrow #PuncEyeWiden
Please note: Word markup is subject to the same limitations as Behavior Tags, in that it is not reliable for languages that do not include natural spaces.
Testing gesture markup
Hand gesture markup can be easily tested using Digital Person Preview or the Media Assets feature in Digital DNA Studio. Simply add the gesture markup to your own sample text and observe the behavior of the Digital Person.
Best practices
Inserting this markup will override Real-Time Gesturing for the entire sentence into which the markup is inserted. In practice, it’s a good idea to insert it into short rather than long sentences, in order to ensure the liveliness of your Digital Person’s behavior continues.
If your sentence is very short, for example two or three words, depending on the length of gesture you’ve chosen you may see it continue into the next sentence, or in some cases not play at all. We recommend testing to see how the gestures look in practice, and using them sparingly.