She walks up, greets you and takes you on a tour of her home. She has a cartoon smile but answers your questions directly and even gives you a stern look when you inadvertently swear. Amazingly she also remembers what you answered when she asked how you were.

Her name is Mona, and she is an interactive digital prototype of a product called NetPeople developed by Toronto-based iNago Inc.

‘What we’re trying to create is a digital human on the Internet,’ says Ron DiCarlantonio, president of iNago.

The software behind NetPeople, he says, will allow a company like Disney to send Mickey Mouse onto their website and actually interact with young visitors and provide information about the company and its latest productions and attractions.

NetPeople works by integrating natural language processors and speech synthesis with 3D graphics and animation. In a nutshell, you can preprogram any number of answers to anticipated questions – just as many sites already do in their faq (frequently asked questions) areas – and have a virtual person give the answers verbally.

iNago’s goal, says DiCarlantonio, is to ultimately create a virtual person lifelike enough that visitors feel they are dealing with a real person.

DiCarlantonio, a graduate of the University of Waterloo with degrees in math and computer science, got his start developing a virtual aquarium called Aquazone in the early 1990s. He says the applications for NetPeople are limitless, particularly in the areas of entertainment and e-commerce.

For example, says Dean Hamilton, iNago’s business and marketing manager, a website developer could program information on a production and have one of the stars – perhaps an animated version of Brad Pitt – come out and answer fan questions about the film.

Or, you could have NetPeople act out Shakespearean tragedies. ‘There’s no reason we couldn’t do a scene from Hamlet if we wanted to,’ he says.

The character can also switch the page on command to any area on the website while staying on the user’s monitor and continuing its interaction while the pages download, Hamilton says.

The engine under the hood is iNago’s proprietary technology called Body and Soul. The ‘body’ is everything that involves the physical characteristics of the virtual person. It lies on the user’s machine and, like a puppet, has a physical body – created through 3D animation – but no brain. The body also integrates speech synthesis through a program called sapi, developed by Microsoft, which allows users to input commands or questions.

The ‘soul’ side is where the character traits come out. It is a combination of the brain plus emotion, DiCarlantonio says. Natural language processing allows the virtual person to attempt to understand what the user said and develop a response. It essentially parses a sentence and tries to isolate the nouns and verbs and, from that, develop some sort of meaning.

‘Natural language processing is a lot further behind than we’d hoped,’ DiCarlantonio says. ‘We’re hoping that by putting out technologies like what we have, that will really spur interest in this area and get the technology up to speed faster.’

The natural language processing technique used in NetPeople is called a slot-frame parser, licensed from San Francisco-based Neuromedia. The program takes a type of sentence, defines it as a template, then matches it to some input.

You can also custom program a character with certain emotions and reactions to different stimuli. If you swear, the ‘character has its own simulation of emotion,’ DiCarlantonio says.

‘So it could be a character that gets pissed off really quickly, or you could have a character that really doesn’t care and it’s really sassy.’ If, for example, you are rude enough to the Mona prototype, she will eventually walk away angry and leave the screen.

The ability to simulate emotion could create some interesting options for, say, a soap opera website. Producers could, for example, create animated versions of some emotionally high-strung characters who would throw tantrums at the slightest provocation.

Or, DiCarlantonio says, fans could log on to the show’s website and simply have a character bring them up to date on plot developments. ‘Through your discussions with the characters, you learn about what happened, or what’s happening,’ he says.

Another application could be to create characters who tell users a story. ‘The whole story would be in its head and you could interact and the interaction would be the entertainment,’ he says.