An approach of improving the small talk capabilities of an existing virtual agent architecture is presented. Findings in virtual agent research revealed the need to pay attention to the sophisticated ...structures found in (human) casual conversations. In particular, existing dialogue act tag sets lack of tags adequately reflecting the subtle structures found in small talk. The approach presented here structures dialogues on two different levels. The micro level consists of meta information (speech functions) that dialogue acts can be tagged with. The macro level is concerned with ordering individual dialogue acts into sequences. The extended dialogue engine allows for a fine-grained selection of responses, enabling the agent to produce varied small talk sequences.
With the advent of communicating machines in the form of embodied agents the question gets ever more interesting under which circumstances such systems could be attributed some sort of consciousness ...and self-identity. We are likely to ascribe to an agent with human appearance and conducting reasonable natural language dialog that it has desires, goals, and intentions. Taking the example of ’Max’, a humanoid agent embodied in virtual reality, this contribution examines under which circumstances an artificial agent could be said to have intentional states and perceive others as intentional agents. We will link our examination to the question of how such a system could have selfawareness and how this is grounded in its (virtual) physis and its social context. We shall discuss how Max could be equipped with the capacity to differentiate between his own and a partner’s mental states and under which conditions Max could reasonably speak of himself as ’I’.
The generation of communicative, speech-accompanying robot gesture is still largely unexplored. We present an approach to enable the humanoid robot ASIMO to flexibly produce speech and co-verbal ...gestures at run-time, while not being limited to a pre-defined repertoire of motor actions. Since much research has already been dedicated to this challenge within the domain of virtual conversational agents, we build upon the experience gained from the development of a speech and gesture production model used for the virtual human Max. We propose a robot control architecture building upon the Articulated Communicator Engine (ACE) that was developed to allow virtual agents to flexibly realize planned multi-modal behavior representations on the spot. Our approach tightly couples ACE with ASIMO's perceptuo-motor system, combining conceptual representation and planning with motor control primitives for speech and arm movements of a physical robot body. First results of both gesture production and speech synthesis using ACE and the MARY text-to-speech system are presented and discussed.
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