embodied conversational agent Papers

Basilica is an event-driven software architecture for creating conversational agents as a collection of reusable components. Software engineers and computer scientists can use this general architecture to create increasingly sophisticated conversational agents. We have developed agents based on Basilica that have been used in various application scenarios and foresee that agents build on Basilica can cater to a wider variety of interactive situations as we continue to add functionality to our architecture. Read more

Technology interfaces can improve human-machine interaction when they learn to adapt to users in social settings. From cars with voice control, to instructable robots that help with housework, to embodied characters that take website requests, technology is increasingly invading our daily lives and new paradigms are emerging to interact with it. Machines are no longer viewed as complicated yet dumb tools, but rather as smart companions that support task management and relieve us of tedious operation... Read more

We describe the design and evaluation of an agent that uses the fillers um and uh in its speech. We describe an empirical study of human-human dialogue, analyzing gaze behavior during the production of fillers and use this data to develop a model of agent-based gaze behavior. We find that speakers are significantly more likely to gaze away from their dialogue partner while uttering fillers, especially if the filler occurs at the beginning of a... Read more

A great challenge that is to be faced in the design of virtual agents is the issue of credibility, not only in the agent's aspect but also in its behavior. To be believable, the agent has to decide what to do next according to the internal and external variables of the agent. Besides others, we have to deal with the problem of action selection which can be resumed to choose the most appropriate action among... Read more

We describe the design and evaluation of an agent that uses the fillers um and uh in its speech. We describe an empirical study of human-human dialogue, analyzing gaze behavior during the production of fillers and use this data to develop a model of agent-based gaze behavior. We find that speakers are significantly more likely to gaze away from their dialogue partner while uttering fillers, especially if the filler occurs at the beginning of a... Read more

Two tools for developing embodied conversational agents and deploying them over the world-wide web to standard web browsers are presented. DTask is a hierarchical task decomposition-based dialogue planner, based on the CEA-2018 task description language standard. LiteBody is an extensible, web-based BML renderer that runs in most contemporary web browsers with no additional software and provides a conversational virtual agent with a range of conversational nonverbal behavior adequate for many user-agent interaction applications. Together, these... Read more

Effective speakers engage their whole body when they gesture. It is difficult, however, to create such full body motion in animated agents while still supporting a large and flexible gesture set. This paper presents a hybrid system that combines motion capture data with a procedural animation system for arm gestures. Procedural approaches are well suited to supporting a large and easily modified set of gestures, but are less adept at producing subtle, full body movement.... Read more

In this paper we present an implementation of a embodied conversational agent that serves as a virtual tour guide in Second Life. We show how we combined the abilities of a conversational agent with navigation in the world and present some preliminary evaluation results. Read more

This paper presents a quest for the most suitable setting and method to assess the naturalness of the output of an existing algorithm for the generation of multimodal referring expressions. For the evaluation of this algorithm a setting in Second Life was built. This paper reports on a pilot study that aimed to assess (1) the suitability of the setting and (2) the design of our evaluation method. Results show that subjects are able to... Read more

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are commonly accepted as a new metaphor of Human Computer Interaction in several application domains. They are also used with the roles of influence and behavior change. We present an empirical evaluation study to compare the motivational impact of a persuasive message when conveyed by Valentina (a female young character [1]) and when presented through a text. The believability of our agent has been successfully evaluated in our previous research. Read more