Are you ready for bots to read your face?

Soul Machines, a New Zealand startup, thinks so. It builds a customer service bot with an amazingly human face and a simulated nervous system that interprets how customers feel and reacts accordingly--in part by watching them over a webcam. As I reported today, design software maker Autodesk will be the first big client to try out the technology next year--what Soul Machines calls a "digital human"--with a remake of its AVA customer service bot. While many companies boast about personalized service but can't afford to hire enough people (and while most existing customer service bots haven't exactly managed to fill in the gap), Soul Machines sees an opportunity for new CGI and AI-driven techniques. AVA's photorealistic appearance--based on scans and recordings of actress Shushila Takao--is an outgrowth of the work the company's founder, Mark Sagar, has done as a CGI engineer for Hollywood films like Avatar; her "emotional intelligence," guiding how she responds to human cues, comes from his AI research simulating a human nervous system in software.