Elckerlyc goes mobile - Enabling natural interaction in mobile user interfaces

The fast growth of computational resources and speech technology available on mobile devices makes it possible to entertain users of these devices in having a natural dialogue with service systems. These systems are sometimes perceived as social agents and this can be supported by presenting them on the interface by means of an animated embodied conversational agent. To take the full advantage of the power of embodied conversational agents in service systems it is important to support real-time, online and responsive interaction with the system through the embodied conversational agent. The design of responsive animated conversational agents is a daunting task. Elckerlyc is a model-based platform for the speci﬿cation and animation of synchronised multi-modal responsive animated agents. This paper presents a new light-weight PictureEngine that allows to run this platform in mobile applications. We describe the integration of the PictureEngine in the user interface of two different coaching applications and discuss the ﬿ndings from user evaluations. We also conducted a study to evaluate an editing tool for the speci﬿cation of the agent’s communicative behaviour. Twenty one participants had to specify the behaviour of an embodied conversational agent using the PictureEngine. We may conclude that this new lightweight back-end engine for the Elckerlyc platform makes it easier to build embodied conversational interfaces for mobile devices

Multimodal agent interfaces and system architectures for health and fitness companions

Multimodal conversational spoken dialogues using physical and virtual agents provide a potential interface to motivate and support users in the domain of health and fitness. In this paper we present how such multimodal conversational Companions can be implemented to support their owners in various pervasive and mobile settings. In particular, we focus on different forms of multimodality and system architectures for such interfaces

Towards a more natural and intelligent interface with embodied conversation agent

Conversational agent also known as chatterbots are computer programs which are designed to converse like a human as much as their intelligent allows. In many ways, they are the embodiment of Turing's vision. The ability for computers to converse with human users using natural language would arguably increase their usefulness. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general have advances this field in realizing the vision of a more humanoid interactive system. This paper presents and discusses the use of embodied conversation agent (ECA) for the imitation games. This paper also presents the technical design of our ECA and its performance. In the interactive media industry, it can also been observed that the ECA are getting popular

An embodied conversational agent for intelligent web interaction on pandemic crisis communication

In times of crisis, an effective communication mechanism is paramount in providing accurate and timely information to the community. In this paper we study the use of an intelligent embodied conversational agent (EGA) as the front end interface with the public for a Crisis Communication Network Portal (CCNet). The proposed system, CCNet, is an integration of the intelligent conversation agent, AINI, and an Automated Knowledge Extraction Agent (AKEA). AKEA retrieves first hand information from relevant sources such as government departments and news channels. In this paper, we compare the interaction of AINI against two popular search engines, two question answering systems and two conversational systems