OLGA - a dialogue system with an animated talking agent

Abstract

The object of the Olga project is to develop an interactive 3D animated talking agent. A futuristic application scenario is interactive digital TV, where the Olga agent would guide naive users through the various services available on the network. The current application is a consumer information service for microwave ovens. Olga required the development of a system with components from many different fields: multimodal interfaces, dialogue management, speech recognition, speech synthesis, graphics, animation, facilities for direct manipulation and database handling. To integrate all knowledge sources Olga is implemented with separate modules communicating with a central dialogue interaction manager. In this paper, we mainly describe the talking animated agent and the dialogue manager. There is also a short description of the preliminary speech recogniser used in the project.