Real-Time Backchannel Selection for ECAs According to User’s Level of Interest
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 all possible (conflicting) ones. In our case, actions are backchannels. This work is part of the STREP EU SEMAINE project in which a real-time Embodied
Conversational Agent (ECA) will be a Sensitive Artificial Listener (SAL). This project aims to build an autonomous talking agent able to exhibit autonomously appropriate verbal and non verbal behaviors in real-time when it plays the role of the listener in a conversation with a user.