These chatbots have realistic faces and can read your expressions

Would your banking experience be more satisfying if you could gaze into the eyes of the bank's customer service chatbot and know it sees you frowning at your overdraft fees? Professor and entrepreneur Mark Sagar thinks so. Sagar won two Academy Awards for novel digital animation techniques for faces used on movies including Avatar and King Kong. He's now an associate professor at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, and CEO of a startup called Soul Machines, which is developing expressive digital faces for customer service chatbots. He says that will make them more useful and powerful, in the same way that meeting someone in person allows for richer communication than chatting via text.