**Speech Graphics Rapport Cloud**
*Thanks to group member Ashley Whitlatch (VP of Marketing at Rapport) for a one hour webinar on the new Speech Graphics consumer service. The webinar was basically a walkthrough of current functionality, in development for the past two years. After beating around the bush, it was revealed that Rapport is a face for chatbots, with a fixed set of characters. They are also working on custom faces, rather than custom avatars. Apparently, the sticking point for custom avatars here as elsewhere is the rigging.*
*At this point, I would call Rapport a video conferencing bot (talking head), but they are working on making it available for embedding into websites. Transport is via webRTC stream. Rapport is based on (real-time) cloud processing infrastructure (CPI), and modularized with CPI modules (CPIm). Currently, there are 4 or 5 chatbot APIs integrated with CPIm, such as Amazon Lex. *