Marni has red hair, stunning blue eyes, the lips of a world-class reading teacher and the voice of a top Parkinson's disease therapist. She tells Ron Cole to say "aaah," nice and loud.

Cole does as told, but with little enthusiasm.

"Use your loud voice," Marni beckons, and Cole puts a bit more into it.

"Super," she says. "That's the loudness you need to use all the time."

Marni lives in Cole's laptop computer and in many other machines. She is a creation of the Center for Spoken Language Research at the University of Colorado, which is directed by Cole, a psychology and computer science professor. Virtual therapists and teachers are proving their mettle in areas as diverse as teaching reading and helping Parkinson's disease patients learn to communicate again.

Listen to the interview with Ron Cole, director of the Center for Spoken Language Research at the University of Colorado. Cole's group produces "virtual therapists" and "virtual teachers" that interact with everyone from Parkinson's patients to children learning to read.

Marni is a mishmash of computer technologies and cutting-edge approaches in teaching and therapy. She's part of an ongoing effort that began nearly a decade ago. The goal, as Cole puts it, is to create "lifelike computer characters that behave like sensitive and effective teachers, testers, therapists, trainers and tutors."

Cole's group appears to be on the right track. Angela Halpern, who researches voice therapies for Parkinson's disease at the National Center for Voice and Speech in Denver, said patients in a recent study worked with Marni as if she were real.

"If she says, 'You need to get louder,' they say, 'Oh, come on, Marni,' " said Halpern, who spent hours in a recording studio to lend her voice to the redheaded avatar's Parkinson's program.

It is a digitized version of the Lee Silverman Voice Treatment method, invented by CU professor and National Center for Voice and Speech researcher Lorraine Ramig. It uses intensive therapy to train Parkinson's patients to speak audibly.

Ramig said there are 6.5 million Parkinson's patients worldwide, 1.5 million of them in the United States. Ninety percent have speech or voice problems.

"The good news is, the therapy is powerfully effective. It's worked successfully in 30 countries around the world," she said. "But the bottleneck is how to give access to this treatment."

Ramig said she figures the global demand for the treatment exceeds available therapist time by thousands of times. That's where Marni can help. In tests with patients starting a year ago, Ramig and Halpern found that, with therapist supervision, Marni can take over about half of the sessions.

"The idea of embracing technology to afford access to treatments is really very powerful," Ramig said.

Marni's lips and facial movements are courtesy of Barbara Wise, a senior researcher at CU's Center for Spoken Language Research. Her "Foundations to Literacy" reading-education program — like Ramig's Parkinson treatment long-proven in the three-dimensional world — is now part of Marni's domain.

Cole fires up an interactive children's book called "The Backyard Zoo." Marni listens with an occasional blink as Cole reads into a headset: "I don't know about today, but I have an idea for ..."

"Tomorrow," Marni finishes, after a pause her software brain determines to be long enough to represent a puzzled child.

Wise spent hours in a video motion-capture studio enunciating the gamut of English's phonetic combinations with 30 white dots stuck around her face. It's the same technology video game developers use to capture Tiger Woods' golf swing and victorious fist-pump.

CU software engineers subdivided Wise's digitized facial movements into scores of discrete "scenes," associating each with a given sound. They matched sounds with letters and words generating them. As the software mows through words in concert with a prerecorded human voice reading them aloud, Marni's lips know where to go.

Sarel van Vuuren, the CU center's director of technical development, says the system integrates speech recognition, graphical and communication technologies to provide a vehicle for a variety of possible "face-to-face" interactions. In addition to Parkinson's disease and reading education, there also are programs to work with cognitively disabled job applicants and people suffering from aphasia, or the loss of speech.

Both the therapeutic and reading-training systems remain works in progress. The reading training has been tested in 50 schools, and a new grant will put it in third-grade through fifth-grade classrooms in the Boulder Valley and St. Vrain Valley school districts in fall 2007, Wise said.

St. Rose of Lima School in Denver has had Marni tutoring in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms since 2004, said Jeannie Courchene, the school's principal. The system is back at CU for upgrades.

Children use it 20 minutes a day, and the program's ability to assess a child's reading ability and quickly tailor readings and exercises helped both low- and high-performers improve, she said.

"It's the most amazing program I have ever seen," Courchene said. "It's been a godsend for our school. We need it back."

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