Papers about Applications

Artificial linguistic Internet computer entity, A.L.I.C.E. is considered head and shoulders above other artificial conversational entities, an ACE in digitaland. Three times winner of Loebner’s annual instantiation of Turing’s Test for machine intelligence in 2000, 2001 and 2004 judged most human-like machine, A.L.I.C.E. was additionally gold medal champion in 2004, for most knowledgeable programme in Chatterbox Challenge and won bronze medal for most popular ACE. As a modern Eliza, A.L.I.C.E appears as a dark-haired, blue-eyed... Read more

A chatbot named Freudbot was constructed using the open source architecture of AIML to determine if a famous person application of chatbot technology could improve student-content interaction in distance education. Fifty-three students in psychology completed a study in which they chatted with Freudbot over the web for 10 minutes under one of two instructional sets. They then completed a questionnaire to provide information about their experience and demographic variables. The results from the questionnaire indicated... Read more

Research about interactive characters suggests substantial opportunities for them to enhance online experiences. Automated characters take advantage of social responses that are natural reactions to interactive media. They can be perceived as realistic and well- liked social partners in conversations that simulate real-world interactions. Characters can express social roles, emotions, and organized personalities that match learning goals, company brands, and transaction needs. Characters can increase the trust that users place in online experiences, in part... Read more

Conversational user interfaces allow various natural communication modes like speech, gestures and facial expressions for input as well as output and exploit the context in which an input is used to compute its meaning. The growing emphasis on conversational user interfaces is fundamentally inspired by the aim to support natural, flexible, efficient and powerfully expressive means of human-computer communication that are easy to learn and use. Advances in human language technology and intelligent user interfaces... Read more

Conversational agents integrate computational linguistics techniques with the communication channel of the Web to interpret and respond to statements made by users in ordinary natural language. Web-based conversational agents deliver high-volumes of interactive text-based dialogs. Recent years have seen significant activity in enterprise-class conversational agents. This chapter describes the principal applications of conversational agents in the enterprise and the technical challenges posed by their design and large-scale deployments. These technical challenges fall into two categories:... Read more

AIML - A recently developed standard for describing knowledge for Robots using XML data structures is introduced. A very large English-based robot knowledge base developed using the standard is described. Many other knowledge-based projects based on other international languages are described. The English-based knowledge base is currently interacting with people at a rate of 100,000 inquiries per day. A unique web-based computer architecture (http://www.pandorabots.com) supporting the on-going development of the knowledge base is described. The... Read more

Responsive Virtual Human Technology (RVHT) involves the use of natural language processing and an emotive behavioral engine to produce natural, interactive dialogues with intelligent, emotive virtual-reality (VR) agents. RVHT has great potential for use in training interaction skills, such as those required for effective survey interviewing. However, our understanding of how people interact with responsive virtual humans (a.k.a. intelligent agents) is quite limited. Better understanding requires employing RVHT in training applications and conducting systematic use,... Read more

In this paper, we describe an application of responsive virtual humans to train law enforcement personnel in dealing with subjects that present symptoms of serious mental illness. JUST-TALK provides a computerized virtual person to interact with the student in a role-playing environment. Students were able to converse with the virtual person using spoken natural language and see and hear the virtual human s responses a combination of facial gesture, body movements, and spoken language. The... Read more

The development of virtual agents running within graphic environments which emulate real-life contexts may largely benefit from the use of visual specification by-example. To support this specification, the development system must be able to interpret the examples and cast their underlying rules into an internal representation language. This language must find a suitable trade-off among a number of contrasting requirements regarding expressiveness, automatic executability, and suitability to the automatic representation of rules deriving from the... Read more

Synthesis of lifelike gesture is finding growing attention in human-computer interaction. In particular, synchronization of synthetic gestures with speech output is one of the goals for embodied conversational agents which have become a new paradigm for the study of gesture and for human-computer interface. In this context, this contribution presents an operational model that enables lifelike gesture animations of an articulated figure to be rendered in real time from representations of spatiotemporal gesture knowledge. Based... Read more