Character design for soccer commmentary

In this paper we present early work on an animated talking head commentary system called {\bf Byrne}\footnote{David Byrne is the lead singer of the Talking Heads.}. The goal of this project is to develop a system which can take the output from the RoboCup soccer simulator, and generate appropriate affective speech and facial expressions, based on the character's personality, emotional state, and the state of play. Here we describe a system which takes pre-analysed simulator output as input, and which generates text marked-up for use by a speech generator and a face animation system. We make heavy use of inter-system standards, so that future versions of Byrne will be able to take advantage of advances in the technologies that it incorporates.