Developing a 3D-agent for the august dialogue system.

Abstract

In our continuing work with multimodal text-to-speech synthesis with high quality for speechreading, a new talking head has been developed with the purpose of acting as an interactive agent in a dialogue system, set up in a public exhibition area in downtown Stockholm. The new agent conforms to the same set of basic control parameters as our earlier faces, allowing us to control it using existing rules for visual speech synthesis. To add to the realism and believability of the dialogue system, the agent has been given a rich repertoire of extra-linguistic gestures and expressions, including emotional cues, turn-taking signals and prosodic cues such as punctuators and emphasizers. Studies of user reactions indicated that people have a positive attitude towards our new agent.