  In this paper we present early work on an animated talking head commentary
system called {\bf Byrne}\footnote{David Byrne is the lead singer of the
Talking Heads.}. The goal of this project is to develop a system which can take
the output from the RoboCup soccer simulator, and generate appropriate
affective speech and facial expressions, based on the character's personality,
emotional state, and the state of play. Here we describe a system which takes
pre-analysed simulator output as input, and which generates text marked-up for
use by a speech generator and a face animation system. We make heavy use of
inter-system standards, so that future versions of Byrne will be able to take
advantage of advances in the technologies that it incorporates.
