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Nadya10/02/20241 replyview on HN

It was disabled yesterday due to the high traffic - but I was able to connect today and after saying hello the chat immediately kicked me off after I asked a question. So unfortunately I've not been able to test it out for more than a few seconds of the "Hello, how can I help you today?"

One thing I've noticed for a lot of these AI video agents, and I've noticed it in Meta's teaser for their virtual agents as well as some other companies, is they seem to love to move their head constantly. It makes them all a bit uncanny and feel like a video game NPC that reacts with a head movement on every utterance. It's less apparent on short 5-10s video clips but the longer the clips the more the constant head movements give it away.

I'm assuming this is, of course, a well known and tough problem to solve and is being worked on. Since swinging too far in the other direction of stiff/little head movements would make it even more uncanny. I'd love to hear what has been done to try and tackle the problem or if at this point it is an accepted "tell" so that one knows when they're speaking with a virtual agent?


Replies

hassaanr10/04/2024

Please try it again when you get the chance! We were dealing with high load the past few days and are good to go again! Re: head movements, I totally agree; natural head movements are really important to make it feel more natural. The issue is controllability today, which is something we're working on as well!