This is Zoe, a project from the Cambridge Research Lab and the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. Zoe is essentially an avatar for a future of “face messaging”.

Zoe can read your text messages, and she can even convey happiness, sadness, tenderness, fear, all with varying degrees of intensity. I suppose that we could easily adapt this on our smartphones to read our text messages or e-mails.

Zoe reminds me a lot of Holly from the science-fiction comedy Red Dwarf, but this was just a real face put on a black screen. You can see the video below and you’ll see how artificial Zoe is. Apparently, it took an actress reading over 7,000 simple sentences to get this far.

I find something really dystopian about floating heads. Films like Equilibrium always show that the future is a boot squashing your face by showing an authoritarian head talking down to the rest of the populace.

In other words, do we need our computers or mobile phones to have a face. I would be more comfortable if they had a vocal personality like Jarvis from Iron Man.

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