NEWS: Chatbots.org survey on 3000 US and UK consumers shows it is time for chatbot integration in customer service!read more..
| by Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers in Cultural awareness, Knowledge, Lexical formulation, Psychology (1999) |
People are narrative animals. As children, our caretakers immerse us in stories: fairy tales, made-up stories, favorite stories, "Read me a story!" Even when barely verbal, we begin to tell our own proto-stories. "Phoebe! Pizza! Phoebe! Pizza!" was the excited story of a 2-year-old friend Addie when one of us happened to arrive simultaneously with the pizza delivery man. This story means, approximately, "Can you believe it? Phoebe and pizza came into the house at... Read more
| by Timothy Bickmore and Justine Cassell in (1999) |
People engage in small talk and conversational storytelling to provide information in engaging ways and to serve interpersonal goals such as building rapport and credibility. Embodied conversational interface agents, that represent the computer in its interaction with human users by way of a graphical humanoid body on a screen, can also profitably engage in these behaviors. We describe the ongoing development of an embodied conversational interface agent that is capable of multimodal input understanding and... Read more
| by Justine Cassell, Timothy Bickmore, Mark Billinghurst, Lee Campbell, Kenny Chang, Hannes Vilhjálmsson and Hao Yan in Agent's Expression, Body motion, Applications (1999) |
In this paper, we argue for embodied conversational characters as the logical extension of the metaphor of human – computer interaction as a conversation. We argue that the only way to fully model the richness of human face-to-face communication is to rely on conversational analysis that describes sets of conversational behaviors as fulfilling conversational functions, both interactional and propositional. We demonstrate how to implement this approach in Rea, an embodied conversational agent that is capable... Read more
| by Justine Cassell and Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson in Agent's Expression, Body posture, Gestures, Body motion (1999) |
Although avatars may resemble communicative interface agents, they have for the most part not profited from recent research into autonomous embodied conversational systems. In particular, even though avatars function within conversational environments (for example, chat or games), and even though they often resemble humans (with a head, hands, and a body) they are incapable of representing the kinds of knowledge that humans have about how to use the body during communication. Humans, however, do make... Read more
