Flipper 2.0: A Pragmatic Dialogue Engine for Embodied Conversational Agents

We present anew dialogue engine called Flipper 2.0 (Flipper) which aims to help developers of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) to quickly and flexibly create dialogues. Flipper provides a technically stable and robust dialogue management system to integrate with other components of ECAs such as behaviour realisers. We compare Flipper with state-of-the-art dialogue design systems. We describe the details of our dialogue engine, how it handles dialogue management and how it supports the authoring of dialogues. We demonstrate the use of the dialogue engine with examples of design patterns and discuss practical applications. Finally we give recommendations on the cases in which it is beneficial to use Flipper

I Probe, Therefore I Am: Designing a Virtual Journalist with Human Emotions

By utilizing different communication channels, such as verbal language, gestures or facial expressions, virtually embodied interactive humans hold a unique potential to bridge the gap between human-computer interaction and actual interhuman communication. The use of virtual humans is consequently becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of areas where such a natural communication might be beneficial, including entertainment, education, mental health research and beyond. Behind this development lies a series of technological advances in a multitude of disciplines, most notably natural language processing, computer vision, and speech synthesis. In this paper we discuss a Virtual Human Journalist, a project employing a number of novel solutions from these disciplines with the goal to demonstrate their viability by producing a humanoid conversational agent capable of naturally eliciting and reacting to information from a human user. A set of qualitative and quantitative evaluation sessions demonstrated the technical feasibility of the system whilst uncovering a number of deficits in its capacity to engage users in a way that would be perceived as natural and emotionally engaging. We argue that naturalness should not always be seen as a desirable goal and suggest that deliberately suppressing the naturalness of virtual human interactions, such as by altering its personality cues, might in some cases yield more desirable results

Selecting and Expressing Communicative Functions in a SAIBA-Compliant Agent Framework

In SAIBA-compliant agent systems, the Function Markup Language (FML) is used to describe the agent's communicative functions that are transformed into utterances accompanied with appropriate non-verbal behaviours. In the context of the ARIA Framework, we propose a template-based approach, grounded in the DIT++ taxonomy, as an interface between the dialogue manager (DM) and the non-verbal behaviour generation (NVBG) components of this framework. Our approach enhances our current FML-APML implementation of FML with the capability of receiving on-the-fly generated natural language and socio-emotional parameters (e.g. emotional stance) for transforming the agent's intents in believable verbal and non-verbal behaviours in an adaptive manner