Enhancing the believability of embodied conversational agents through environment-, self- and interaction-awareness

  • Authors:

  • Kiran Ijaz;Anton Bogdanovych;Simeon Simoff

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Technology, Sydney, NSW, Australia;University of Western Sydney, NSW, Australia;University of Western Sydney, NSW, Australia

  • Venue:
  • ACSC '11 Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Australasian Computer Science Conference - Volume 113
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Research on embodied conversational agents' reasoning and actions has mostly ignored the external environment. This papers argues that believability of such agents is tightly connected with their ability to relate to the environment during a conversation. This ability, defined as awareness believability, is formalised in terms of three components - environment-, self- and interaction-awareness. The paper presents a method enabling virtual agents to reason about their environment, understand the interaction capabilities of other participants, own goals and current state of the environment, as well as to include these elements into conversations. We present the implementation of the method and a case study, which demonstrates that such abilities improve the overall believability of virtual agents.