The object of the Olga project is to develop an interactive 3D animated talking agent. A futuristic application scenario is interactive digital TV, where the alga agent would guide naive users through the various services available on the network. The current application is a consumer information service for microwave ovens. alga required the development of a system with components from many different fields: multimodal interfaces, dialogue management, speech recognition, speech synthesis, graphics, animation, facilities for direct manipulation and database handling. To integrate all knowledge sources alga is implemented with separate modules communicaring with a central dialogue interaction manager. In this paper we mainly describe the talking animated agent and the dialogue manager. There is also a short description of the preliminary speech recogniser used in the project
