embodied conversational agent Papers

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) provide one possible way of incorporating nonverbal portion of speech into voice based user interfaces. Part of agent's visual behavior and its appearance is often solved "statically." There is another possibility to change appearance - dynamically (for example head or eye movements, mouth opening, etc.). Our hypothesis is that some "dynamic" parameters are more important for the user than the other ones. In this paper we present the pilot user study... Read more

We discuss the ethical and practical issues involved in developing virtual humans that relate personal, fictitious, human autobiographical stories ("back stories") to their users. We describe a virtual human exercise counselor that interacts with users daily to promote exercise, and the integration of a dynamic social storytelling engine used to maintain user engagement with the agent and retention in the intervention. A longitudinal randomized controlled experiment tested user attitudes towards the agent when it presented... Read more

Virtual Humans are artificial characters who look and act like humans, but inhabit a simulated environment. One important aspect of many virtual humans is their communicative dialogue ability. In this paper we outline a methodology for study of dialogue behavior and construction of virtual humans. We also consider three architectures for different types of virtual humans that have been built at the Institute for Creative Technologies. Read more

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are life-like CG characters that interact with human users in face-to-face conversations. To achieve natural multi-modal conversations, ECA systems are sophisticated and are composed with assemblies of various functions. They are thus difficult for an individual research group to develop. To address this problem, we are developing a Generic ECA Framework to integrate those assemblies with each other seamlessly. It is composed with a low-level communication platform, a high-level protocol and... Read more

In this article we present a research scheme which aims to analyze the use of Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) technology to improve the robustness and acceptability of speaker enrolment and verification dialogues designed to provide secure access through natural and intuitive speaker recognition. In order to find out the possible effects of the visual information channel provided by the ECA, tests were carried out in which users were divided into two groups, each interacting with... Read more

Researchers demand much from their embodied conversational agents (ECAs), requiring them to be both life-like, as well as responsive to events in an interactive setting. We find that a flexible combination of animation approaches may be needed to satisfy these needs. In this paper we present SmartBody, an open source modular framework for animating ECAs in real time, based on the notion of hierarchically connected animation controllers. Controllers in SmartBody can employ arbitrary animation algorithms... Read more

Embodied Conversational Agents (also known as ECA) are animated software agents (usually very similar to the human figure) which represent the possibility of extending the aim of common conversation systems and perform non appropriate verbal behavior, such as facial expressions, looks, gestures and processing of natural language in all its levels, contributing to a better understanding of a message. Bickmore (2003) defines such agents as entities which use, in real time, speech, gestures, observation (among... Read more

This paper presents the NECA approach to the generation of dialogues between Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). This approach consist of the automated constructtion of an abstract script for an entire dialogue (cast in terms of dialogue acts), which is incrementally enhanced by a series of modules and finally ”performed” by means of text, speech and body language, by a cast of ECAs. The approach makes it possible to automatically produce a large variety of highly... Read more

What is the hallmark of success in human-agent interaction? In animation and robotics, many have concentrated in the looks of the agent - whether the appearance is realistic of lifelike. We present an alternative benchmark that lies in the dyad and not the agent alone: Does the agent's behavior evoke intersubjectivity from the user? That is, in both conscious and unconscious communication, do users react to behaviorally realistic agents in the same way they react... Read more

We performed an empirical study exploring people’s interactions with an embodied conversational agent (ECA) while performing two tasks. Conditions varied with respect to 1) whether participants were allowed to choose an agent and its characteristics and 2) the putative quality or appropriateness of the agent for the tasks. For both tasks, selection combined with the illusion of further customization significantly improved participants’ overall subjective impressions of the ECAs while putative quality had little or no... Read more