The first research example concerns a multimodal interactive dialogue system, built within the European project SEMAINE lead by Queen’s University Belfast and its partners. The first state of the art video shows a virtual person, Spike, having a spoken dialogue with Sabine, a researcher. They are having a conversation about the world, attitudes towards life and approaches to reality. During the conversation, virtual Spike listens to its partner in conversation and adapts its own behavior accordingly. Thanks to its social capabilities, Spike interprets Sabine’s emotions and shows its own emotional state. The confrontational behavior that Spike exhibits presents the use of various strategies of leading an affective conversation. The video is available on Chatbots.org.

The second achievement in virtual human technology makes use of conversational 3D humans applied to the psychiatric medical field. The researchers from Institute for Creative Technologies at University of Southern California created a virtual reality environment, i.e. a real room with projections on all walls, to conduct trainings with virtual patients that converse, understand, and exhibit emotions. They aim to portray a patient with a clinical or physical condition and teach medicine students interpersonal skills. This video presents a 3D virtual human that speaks and expresses emotions during an interview with a mental health clinician. Chatbots.org believes that 3D humans have much larger potential of applications, almost unlimited, and virtual patients constitute just the beginning of virtual assistants’ work. The video is also available on Chatbots.org.

The third State of the Art example is connected with awareness ability of 3D interactive conversational virtual assistants. Researchers from University of Technology Sydney and University of Western Sydney argue that the believability of such virtual agents is tightly connected to their ability to relate to the environment during a conversation. These researchers have developed self-aware virtual agents which understand the interaction capabilities of other participants, reason about the current state of their environment, and include these elements in conversations. The video that can be watched on Chatbots.org provides a demonstration of intelligent conversational virtual humans being aware of the virtual world around them during the conversation.

“It’s time to reveal the secrets of our industry,” says Futurist Erwin Van Lun, CEO and Founder of Chatbots.org, discussing the new videos. “In many ways, we’re able to simulate human behavior through virtual human technology, and we’ll continue to publish new examples to set the stage.”

Find out more about these and other examples of current research in the conversational artificial intelligence industry.