BEAT: the Behavior Expression Animation Toolkit

Justine Cassell, Hannes Vilhjálmsson, Timothy Bickmore
MIT Media Lab 20 Ames St., E15-315
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
+1 617 253 4899
{justine, hannes, bickmore}@media.mit.edu

ABSTRACT

The Behavior Expression Animation Toolkit (BEAT) allows animators to input typed text that they wish to be spoken by an animated human figure, and to obtain as output appropriate and synchronized nonverbal behaviors and synthesized speech in a form that can be sent to a number of different animation systems. The nonverbal behaviors are assigned on the basis of actual linguistic and contextual analysis of the typed text, relying on rules derived from extensive research into human conversational behavior. The toolkit is extensible, so that new rules can be quickly added. It is designed to plug into larger systems that may also assign personality profiles, motion characteristics, scene constraints, or the animation styles of particular animators.