AVATAR: An Open Source Architecture for Embodied Conversational Agents in Smart Environments

Author(s):  
Marcos Santos-Pérez ◽  
Eva González-Parada ◽  
José Manuel Cano-García
2022 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Tessa Beinema ◽  
Harm op den Akker ◽  
Dennis Hofs ◽  
Boris van Schooten

Health coaching applications can include (embodied) conversational agents as coaches. The development of these agents requires an interdisciplinary cooperation between eHealth application developers, interaction designers and domain experts. Therefore, proper dialogue authoring tools and tools to integrate these dialogues in a conversational agent system are essential in the process of creating successful agent-based applications. However, we found no existing open source, easy-to-use authoring tools that support multidisciplinary agent development. To that end, we developed the WOOL Dialogue Platform. The WOOL Dialogue Platform provides the eHealth and conversational agent communities with an open source platform, consisting of a set of easy to use tools that facilitate virtual agent development. The platform consists of a dialogue definition language, an editor, application development libraries and a web service. To illustrate the platform’s possibilities and use in practice, we describe two use cases from EU Horizon 2020 research projects. The WOOL Dialogue Platform is an ‘easy to use, and powerful if needed’ platform for the development of conversational agent applications that is seeing a slow but steady increase in uptake in the eHealth community. Developed to support dialogue authoring for embodied conversational agents in the health coaching domain, this platform’s strong points are its ease of use and ability to let domain experts and agents technology experts work together by providing all parties with tools that support their work effectively.


2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Cassell ◽  
Andrea Tartaro

What is the hallmark of success in human–agent interaction? In animation and robotics, many have concentrated on the looks of the agent — whether the appearance is realistic or lifelike. We present an alternative benchmark that lies in the dyad and not the agent alone: Does the agent’s behavior evoke intersubjectivity from the user? That is, in both conscious and unconscious communication, do users react to behaviorally realistic agents in the same way they react to other humans? Do users appear to attribute similar thoughts and actions? We discuss why we distinguish between appearance and behavior, why we use the benchmark of intersubjectivity, our methodology for applying this benchmark to embodied conversational agents (ECAs), and why we believe this benchmark should be applied to human–robot interaction.


2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markku Turunen ◽  
Jaakko Hakulinen ◽  
Cameron Smith ◽  
Daniel Charlton ◽  
Li Zhang ◽  
...  

2006 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 37-45
Author(s):  
Barbara Becker

The construction of embodied conversational agents – robots as well as avatars – seem to be a new challenge in the field of both cognitive AI and human-computer-interface development. On the one hand, one aims at gaining new insights in the development of cognition and communication by constructing intelligent, physical instantiated artefacts. On the other hand people are driven by the idea, that humanlike mechanical dialog-partners will have a positive effect on human-machine-communication. In this contribution I put for discussion whether the visions of scientist in this field are plausible and which problems might arise by the realization of such projects.


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