Artificial Intelligence for Digital Characters

courses

Overview

This lecture provides an overview of techniques to build conversational digital characters. The main components of conversational digital characters are introduced: chatbots, speech recognition, speech synthesis, and animation synthesis. Real-life applications of such digital characters are demonstrated on different use cases (e.g., Digital Einstein).

Content

The lecture opens with basics on digital characters. Afterwards, the main components to build a conversational digital character are introduced. This includes the basics of natural language processing used to build a chatbot, speech recognition, speech synthesis, and animating a digital character based on motion capturing and deep learning. Further, autonomous agents based on knowledge graphs are covered. The lecture ends with real-life applications of digital characters.

Details

LevelGraduate (MSc / PhD)
SemesterSpring
InstitutionETH Zurich, D-INFK
RoleCourse creator & lecturer
Years2024 – present
Course
Dr. Rafael Wampfler
Authors
Dr. Rafael Wampfler
Senior Researcher & Lecturer

I am a Senior Researcher & Lecturer at the Computer Graphics Laboratory of ETH Zurich, and a Research Consultant at Disney Research. I am leading the Digital Character AI projects at CGL. My research interests include conversational digital characters, affective computing, human-computer interaction, and applied machine learning.

My vision is to create intelligent digital humans that can naturally communicate, understand, and support people across domains such as education and mental health. My research focuses on multimodal artificial intelligence for interactive digital humans, developing models that combine large language models, affective computing, and data-driven animation to create embodied conversational agents endowed with autonomous agency, consistent values, and beliefs.

My work bridges machine learning, human–computer interaction, and computer graphics to enable AI systems such as Digital Einstein and interactive patient avatars for psychotherapy training and health education.