February 22, 2006
Justine Cassell
Embodied Conversational Agents
"What is an Embodied Conversational Agent? It is a lifesize virtual human capable of carrying on conversations with humans by both understanding and producing speech, hand gesture and facial expressions. Embodied Conversational Agents are a type of multimodal interface where the modalities are the natural modalities of human conversation: speech, facial displays, hand gestures, body stance. They are a type of software agent insofar as they exist to do the bidding of their human users, or to represent their human users in a computational environment. They are a type of dialogue system where both verbal and non-verbal devices advance and regulate the dialogue between the user and the computer. In the Embodied Conversational Agent, the visual dimension of interacting with a cartoon character on a screen (rather than a keyboard) is intrinsic to its function. The graphics are not just pretty pictures, but visual displays of conversation, in the same way that the face and hands serve that function in face-to-face conversation among humans..."
Posted by jo at February 22, 2006 07:58 AM
