Adding animated presentation agents to the interface

AI Magazine, 2001

2001

Lifelike characters, or animated agents, provide a promising option for interface development as they allow us to draw on communication and interaction styles with which humans are already familiar. In this contribution, we revisit some of our past and ongoing projects in order to motivate an evolution of character-based presentation systems. This evolution starts from systems in which a character presents information content in the style of a TVpresenter. It moves on with the introduction of presentation teams that convey information to the user by performing role plays. In order to explore new forms of active user involvement during a presentation, the next step may lead to systems that convey information in the style of interactive performances. From a technical point of view, this evaluation is mirrored in different approaches to determine the behavior of the employed characters. By means of concrete applications, we argue that a central planning component for automated agent scripting is not always a good choice, especially not in the case of interactive performances where the user may take on an active role as well.

Applied Artificial Intelligence, 1999

2001

With the advent of software agents and assistants, the concept of so called conversational user interfaces evolved, incorporating natural language interaction, dialogue management, and anthropomorphic representations. Today's challenge is to build a suitable visualization architecture for anthropomorphic conversational user interfaces, and to design believable and appropriate face-to-face interaction imitating human attributes such as emotions. The system is designed as an autonomous agent enabling easy integration into a variety of scenarios. Architecture, protocols, and graphical output are discussed.

Referring Phenomena in a Multimedia Context and their Computational Treatment on - ReferringPhenomena '97, 1997

Knowledge-Based Systems, 1998

Rapid growth of competition on the electronic market place, will generate the demand for new innovative communication styles with web users. In this paper, we develop an operational approach for the automated generation of hypermedia presentations. Unlike conventional hypermedia, we use a lifelike presentation agent which presents the generated material, and guides the user through a dynamically expanding navigation space. The approach relies on a model that combines behavior planning for lifelike characters with concepts from hypermedia authoring such as timeline structures and navigation graphs.

International Workshop on Information Presentation and Natural Multimodal Dialogue, 2001

1 Abstract This paper illustrates the architecture of a multimodal believable agent, provided with a personality and a social role, aiming at providing information to users engaging them in a natural conversation. To achieve this aim, we provide our agent with a mind, a dialogue manager and a body: a) the mind, according to the agent's personality, the events occuring and the user dialog move, triggers, if appropriate, an emotion; b) the dialog manager, according to an overall dialog goal and the corresponding plan to be pursued, selects the ...

Life-Like Characters– …, 2003

… of the 3rd international conference on …, 1998

Embodied …, 2000