Embodied conversational agents in Wizard-of-Oz and multimodal interaction applications

Embodied conversational agents employed in multimodal interaction applications have the potential to achieve similar properties as humans in face-to-face conversation. They enable the inclusion of verbal and nonverbal communication. Thus, the degree of personalization of the user interface is much higher than in other human-computer inter-faces. This, of course, greatly contributes to the naturalness and user friendliness of the interface, opening-up a wide area of possible applications. Two implementations of embodied conversational agents in human-computer interaction are presented in this paper: the first one in a Wizard-of-Oz application and the second in a dialogue system. In the Wizard-of-Oz application, the embodied conversational agent is applied in a way that it conveys the spoken information of the operator to the user with whom the operator communicates. Depending on the scenario of the application, the user may or not be aware of the operator's involvement. The operator can communicate with the user based on audio/visual, or only audio, communication. This paper describes an application setup, which enables distant communication with the user, where the user is unaware of the operator's involvement. A real-time viseme recognizer is needed to ensure a proper response from the agent. In addition, implementation of the embodied conversational agent Lili hosting an entertainment show, which is broadcast by RTV Slovenia, will be described in more detail. Employment of the embodied conversational agent as a virtual major-domo named Maja, within an intelligent ambience, using speech recognition system and TTS system PLATTOS, will be also described.