this paper, we investigate a new style for presenting information. We introduce the notion of presentation teams which---rather than addressing the user directly---convey information in the style of performances to be observed by the user. The paper is organized as follows. First, we report on our experience with two single animated presentation agents and explain how to evaluate their success. After that, we move to presentation teams and discuss their potential benefits for presentation tasks. In section 2, we describe the basic steps of our approach to the automated generation of performances with multiple characters. This approach has been applied to two different in: J. Cassell, S. Prevost, J. Sullivan, and E. Churchill: Embodied Conversational

that interaction rituals among humans, such as greetings, small talk and conventional leavetakings, along with their manifestations in speech and in embodied conversational behaviors, can lead the users of technology to judge the technology as more reliable, competent and knowledgeable -- to trust the technology more. Trust is essential for all kinds of interpersonal interactions; it is the loom on which is woven the social fabric of society. Trust between humans has to do with credibility, with believing one another, with confidence in another's judgments, and beliefs that another's actions fit our own schemata of how to act. We use the interaction rituals of conversation, in part, to demonstrate our trustworthiness and, more generally, to establish and maintain social relationships where trust is important. Building rapport and common ground through small talk, intimacy through self-disclosure, credibility through the use of technical jargon, social networks through gossip, and "face" through politeness, are all examples of this phenomenon. These social uses of language are not important just in purely social settings, but are also crucialThis article is about the kind of trust that is demonstrated in human face-to-face interaction, and approaches to and benefits of having our computer interfaces depend on these same manifestations of trustworthiness. In making technology that is actually trustworthy your morals can really be your only guide. But, assuming that you're a good person, and have built a technology that does what it promises, or that represents people who do what they promise, then read on. We're taking as a point of departure our earlier work on the effects of representing the computer as a human body. Here we are going to argue to the establishment and ...

This paper describes the results of a research project aimed at implementing a ‘realistic ’ 3D Embodied Agent that can be animated in real-time and is ‘believable and expressive’: that is, able to communicate with coherency complex information, through the combination and the tight synchronisation of verbal and nonverbal signals. We describe, in particular, how we `animate ' this Agent (that we called Greta) so as to enable her to manifest the affective states that are dynamically activated and de-activated in her mind during the dialog with the user. The system is made up of three tightly interrelated components:- a representation of the Agent Mind: this includes long and short-term affective components (personality and emotions) and simulates how emotions are triggered and decay over time according to the Agent’s personality and to the context and how several emotions may overlap. Dynamic belief networks with weighting of goals is the formalism we employ to this purpose;- a mark-up language to denote the communicative meanings that may be associated with dialog moves performed by the Agent;- a translation of the Agent’s tagged move into a face expression, that combines appropriately the available channels (gaze direction, eyebrow shape, head direction and movement etc). The final output is a 3-D facial model that respects the MPEG-4 standard and uses MPEG-4 Facial Animation Parameters to produce facial expressions. Throughout the paper, we illustrate the results obtained, with an example of dialog in the domain of ‘Advice about eating disorders’. The paper concludes with an analysis of advantages of our cognitive model of emotion triggering and of the problems found in testing it. Although we did not yet complete a formal evaluation of our system, we briefly describe how we plan to assess the agent’s believability in terms of consistency of its communicative behavior.

During the past decade, due largely to progress inspired by the DARPA Speech Grand Challenge project and similar international efforts (Martin et al. 1997; Cole et al. 1997), significant progress has occurred in the development of spoken language technology (SLT). Spoken language systems now are

Research on anthropomorphic agent interfaces has produced widely divergent results. We suggest that this is due to insufficient consideration of key factors that influence the perception and effectiveness of agent-based interfaces. We propose a framework for studying anthropomorphic agents that can systematize the research. The framework emphasizes features of the agent, the user, and the task the user is performing. Our initial experiment within this framework manipulated the agent’s appearance (lifelike versus iconic) and the nature of the user’s task (carrying out procedures versus providing opinions). We found that the perception of the agent was strongly influenced by the task while features of the agent that we manipulated had little effect.

Embodied conversational agents become more and more realistic concerning their conversational and their nonverbal behaviors. But if the information conveyed nonverbally exhibits clues that are not consistent with the verbal part of an agent’s action, how will the user react to such a discrepancy? Masking ones real emotions with a smile is a naturally occuring example of such a discrepancy. But such masks are often deficient and thus subtle clues of lying and deceiving manifest themselves in facial expressions. The questions is how users will react to these clues if they are conveyed by an agent. Will they render an application unattractive or on the contrary more human-like? In this paper, we examine such facial clues to deception and present the results of two empirical studies: i.) lies in monologues by a talking head presenting movies, ii.) lies in an interactive game of dice.

The design of robust interfaces that process conversational speech is a challenging research direction largely because users’ spoken language is so variable. This research explored a new dimension of speaker stylistic variation by examining whether users’ speech converges systematically with the text-to-speech (TTS) heard from a software partner. To pursue this question, a study was conducted in which twenty-four 7-to-10-yearold children conversed with animated partners that embodied different TTS voices. An analysis of children’s amplitude, durational features, and dialogue response latencies confirmed that they spontaneously adapt several basic acoustic-prosodic features of their speech 10-50%, with the largest adaptations involving utterance pause structure and amplitude. Children’s speech adaptations were relatively rapid, bidirectional, and dynamically readaptable when introduced to new partners, and generalized across different types of users and TTS voices. Adaptations also occurred consistently, with 70-95 % of children converging with their partner’s TTS, although individual differences in magnitude of adaptation were evident. In the design of future conversational systems, users’ spontaneous convergence could be exploited to guide their speech within system processing bounds, thereby enhancing robustness. Adaptive system processing could yield further significant performance gains. The long-term goal of this research is the development of predictive models of human-computer communication to guide the design of new

The paper presents an investigation into the question how a specification of the behaviour of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) can be grounded in empirical investigations of human conversational behaviour. We consider various empirical approaches and discuss one particular approach based on Dialogue Games in detail. We identify some pitfalls and problems which one faces when translating the results of such empirical investigations to algorithms for ECAs. Our discussion is illustrated by means of a specific investigation into the use of deictic referential acts in conversations.

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Abstract- Various methods can be used for evaluating human-robot interaction. The appropriateness of those evaluation methodologies depends on the roles that people assume in interacting with robots. In this paper we focus on developing an evaluation strategy for the bystander role. In this role, the person has no training in interacting with the robot and must develop a mental model to co-exist in the same environment with the robot. Keywords: Human- robot interaction, social interaction, user roles, mental models, conceptual models, intelligent systems. 1