Creating an animated character and using it for educational purposes can be a great combination. That’s exactly what Voki, a free service aims to achieve with easy to use and intuitive user interface.

Voki.com allows quick creation of a personalised avatar with text-to-voice engine that reads out any given text with facial expressions and lip movements, enabling interactivity over otherwise simple websites such as Blogger.

Registration is a breeze after which a three-step wizard is launched. Press the ‘Create a New Voki’ button to get started with the first step. Here, there is a huge collection to select a base-character from, such as Santa-clauses and gingerbread man under holidays category, dogs, cats and other animals, cartoons, edgy characters having eccentric faces, oddballs, popular political figures and many more.

Each of the selected base-character can now be further customised using the tweak sliders at the bottom of the character frame. Features such as mouth, nose, body, height and width can be stretched or compressed in addition to alteration in the colour of mouth, eyes, skin and hair of the character.

This takes customisation to a whole new level of detail where one finds spending a lot of time enjoying a large number of permutations that can be achieved. Clothing can also be changed, depending upon what type of character or avatar is being planned. A large variety of suitings are available under dressy category such as jackets with bows, neckties, inners, trendy sweaters, overcoats, etc. The casual dressing tab allows selection from t-shirts while uniform tab can make the character dressed up to be a chef, pilot, sports person, military and commando recruit or a doctor.

The third tab is named ‘bling’ which allows a character to wear glasses and neck ornaments. Once this customisation is completed, press the ‘Done’ button. This brings up ‘Give it a voice’ section which is once again as intensive when it comes to mix and match as was the character design. Characters can be given their voice based on text input, direct input from mike allowing recording of up to 60 seconds, or an audio file upload allowing popular file formats such as MP3, WAV and WMA, etc.

What makes this fun is experimentation with different language-accents, such as French, Dutch, Greek, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi and many more, along with different sub-accent types within each. For example, there’s one sub-Arabic accent with the name of Tarik that emphasises too much on sound of character ‘h’, while the voice of Maged (apparently Majeed), emphasises too much on sound of character ‘r’. To add more variation, there are different voice effects available such as whisper, reverb, squeaky, echo, etc.

Press ‘Done’ to proceed ahead to setting up a background that contains libraries of night life, city view, outdoors, indoors, travel, nature, sports and many more. Based on the personality of character being developed, these backgrounds can be quite supportive, such as a sheriff can be made to appear standing right in front of a brightly lit police car, a sports person on a relevant court or a tourist standing in the backdrop of popular destinations and landmarks of the world. The last customisation item is the application of themes on the character frame to make its play control look different.

Now the time has come to publish this detailed character. Press ‘Publish’ to get a link over email or select one of the popular social networking or blogging sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, TypePad, etc.

Voki can be taken to the next level by creating Voki Classroom and browsing through the lesson plans delivered by other Voki users, such as teaching students about geography, science, human physiology, etc. There’s a dedicated teacher blog section for those looking to use Voki for educational purpose.

Happy animating and learning!