"How about this weather?" Social Dialogue with Embodied Conversational Agents

Abstract

Social dialogue can be used by an embodied interface agent both to satisfy interpersonal goals, such as building rapport with the user and demonstrating the expertise of the agent, and to directly or indirectly satisfy task goals, such as acquiring background information about the user. We describe the ongoing development of an embodied conversational agent that is capable of multimodal input understanding and output generation and operates in a limited application domain in which both social and taskoriented dialogue are used. An approach to discourse planning for social dialogue is described, along with an implementation and preliminary evaluation.