Expressive Animated Agents for Affective Dialogue Systems

We present our current state of development regarding animated agents applicable to affective dialogue systems. A new set of tools are under development to support the creation of animated characters compatible with the MPEG-4 facial animation standard. Furthermore, we have collected a multimodal expressive speech database including video, audio and 3D point motion registration. One of the objectives of collecting the database is to examine how emotional expression influences articulatory patterns, to be able to model this in our agents. Analysis of the 3D data shows for example that variation in mouth width due to expression greatly exceeds that due to vowel quality