Having an Animated Coffee with a Group of Chatbots from the 19 ^th Century

Abstract

Beyond current dyadic chatbots and voice-based personal assistants, this demo showcases a novel experience where users interact with multiple, text-based conversational systems as if seating around a table with them. Two key technologies allow the seamless interaction between users and chatbots: (1) A state-of-art artificial conversational governance system which allows a natural flow of conversation without the use of vocatives to trigger the chatbot responses; (2) a conversation visualization mechanism where the utterances from participants are aesthetically projected on a tabletop. Those technologies were developed originally for "Café com os Santiagos" an artwork where visitors conversed with three chatbots portraying characters from a book in a scenographic space recreating a 19th-century coffee table. The demo allows users to seat to actually have coffee and chat with multi-chatbots characters.