conversational agents Papers

In the last years we have developed a platform for the realization of embodied (conversational) agents, in a distributed logic programming framework. In this paper we will present an overview of our work, by discussing the requirements that acted as our guidelines for design decisions during development, some of the applications that have served as target demonstrators for developing and testing new functionality, and the (distributed logic programming) technology which we used for the realization of the platform... Read more

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are designed to provide natural and intuitive communication with a human user. One major current topic in agent design consequently is to enhance their believability, often by incorporating internal models of emotions or motivations. As psychological theories often lack the necessary details for direct implementation, many agent modelers currently rely on models that are rather marginal in current psychological research, or models that are created ad hoc with little theoretical and... Read more

Embodied conversational agents may take on a diversity of roles in learning and advisory scenarios including virtual teachers, advisors, learning companions, and autonomous actors in educational role play. They promote learner motivation, engagement, and self-confidence, and may help prevent and overcome negative affective states of learners, such as frustration and fear of failure. The chapter will provide guidelines and approved methods for the development of animated pedagogical agents including the extraction of multimodal tutorial... Read more

This paper seeks to investigate current development and applications of these systems worldwide, while focusing on their availability in Canadian libraries. It aims to argue that it is both timely and conceivable for Canadian libraries to consider adopting conversational agents to enhance – not replace – face-to-face human interaction. Potential users include library web site tour guides, automated virtual reference and readers' advisory librarians, and virtual story-tellers. To provide background and justification for this argument,... Read more

Unit selection speech synthesis has reached high levels of naturalness and intelligibility for neutral read aloud speech. However, synthetic speech generated using neutral read aloud data lacks all the attitude, intention and spontaneity associated with everyday conversations. Unit selection is heavily data dependent and thus in order to simulate human conversational speech, or create synthetic voices for believable virtual characters, we need to utilise speech data with examples of how people talk rather than how... Read more

Elckerlyc is a BML Realizer for generating multimodal verbal and nonverbal behavior for Virtual Humans (VHs). The main characteristics of Elckerlyc are that (1) it is designed specifically for continuous interaction with tight temporal coordination between the behavior of a VH and its interaction partner; (2) it provides a mix between the precise temporal and spatial control offered by procedural animation and the physical realism of physical simulation; and (3) it is designed to be... Read more

We describe our work-in-progress of developing an educational game in mathematics for 12-14 year olds, by adding social and conversational abilities to an existing “teachable agent” (TA) in the game. The purpose of this extension is to affect cognitive, emotional and social constructs known to promote learning, such as self-efficacy and engagement, as well as enhancing students’ experiences of interacting with the agent over an extended period of time. Drawing from the EnALI framework, which... Read more

Paper "The Persona Zero-Effect: Evaluating virtual character benefits on a learning task with repeated interactions" presents embodied agents, that have the potential to become a highly natural human-computer interaction device - they are already is use as tutors, presenters and assistants. However, it remains an open question whether adding an agent to an application has a measurable impact, positive or negative, in terms of motivation and learning performance. Prior studies are very diverse with respect... Read more

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) are computer-animated characters that simulate face-to-face conversation with patients. These agents can be programmed with best practices in human-human health communication and used for automated health education and behavior change counseling interventions. Evidence is presentedfrom two ongoing clinical trials demonstrating that patients at different levels of health literacy find these agents acceptable and easy to use for automated health communication interventions. Innovative computer interface systems can be used to ensure that... 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