Rating:

In a hurry?  Recommendation   

NOAH is one of the most sophisticated avatar authoring tools currently available on the market and is reasonably priced. The animation software allows you to add talking, animated avatars or characters to your company website, CBT, or asynchronous course.

The characters can express social roles and emotions. With the tool, you can create personalities that match learning goals, company brands, and circumstances.

NOAH's Wizard character, for example, looks like Merlin. He—if I can call an animated character “he”—could introduce a technical discussion of software features, for example, or add technical highlights to a sales-oriented website. The Wizard can wave good-bye and disappear in a flash, only to reappear later on another webpage.

The NOAH-generated avatar has very life-like qualities: movement, human-like speech with different accents or inflections, movements and gestures that accompany speech (nodding, turning the head left or right, shrugging shoulders, pointing), and personality (different clothes, colors, hairstyles). The technology can portray emotional states such as angry, bored, concerned, confiding, confused, and assertive.

These features are accessed through a series of buttons on the online authoring interface. You simply select the features you want, and you have built an avatar out of parts that seamlessly play together. You might, for example, select:

Female + Glasses + Standard Glasses + Hair + Pony Tail + Long Skirt + Blue + Accent

You would then hit the “Make me talk” button to view your creation.

After creating the physical features of your avatar, you can direct it to perform actions on the screen. A NOAH character can call up a graphic, make a graphic turn different colors, start a movie, or do almost anything you might want done.

Practically, this means that the avatar can move around and point things out on a web page while providing explanations of content on the page. One reason avatars are powerful is that they can increase retention and do so in a way that is easy and comfortable for the user.

The technical requirements are modest, and the web-authoring tool is remarkably easy to use. The NOAH-generated avatar is also easy to integrate into HTML and Flash-based projects.

Avatars attract and hold attention. Essentially, they are an engagement device.  When an avatar points something out and discusses it in detail, for example, you tend to pay attention and look at the information on the page. Avatars help make connections, just as instructors do in a classroom. By bringing a person-like facilitator to an online environment, you can embody and personify the instructor, arguably the most powerful ingredient to success in a classroom.

The vendor offers several pricing schemes, including subscriptions and out-right purchase. The pricing is unnecessarily convoluted, however. Subscriptions range from $9.95 to $89.95 month plus additional fees based on volume, number, and technical sophistication of avatars used. Fees also vary depending on whether or not all files hosted on your company’s server.

In other words, it is difficult to estimate the final cost to purchase and use NOAH because it includes variable costs. Consequently, I recommend the simpler choice: the Developer version. It has no hidden or variable fees and requires a modest investment of $2,995.

Recommendation
I give NOAH a “strong buy” recommendation. The product—a talking, human-like character—is a versatile tool that can be used in many ways ultimately limited only by your imagination. When you take into consideration the product's text-to-speech engine, cost, and interactive capabilities, I recommend NOAH over other learning-agent technology.

NOAH Rating