Abstract
Embodied conversational agents employed in multimodal interaction applications have the potential to achieve similar properties as humans in face-to-face conversation. They enable the inclusion of verbal and nonverbal communication. Thus, the degree of personalization of the user interface is much higher than in other human-computer interfaces. This, of course, greatly contributes to the naturalness and user friendliness of the interface, opening-up a wide area of possible applications. Two implementations of embodied conversational agents in human-computer interaction are presented in this paper: the first one in a Wizard-of-Oz application and the second in a dialogue system. In the Wizard-of-Oz application, the embodied conversational agent is applied in a way that it conveys the spoken information of the operator to the user with whom the operator communicates. Depending on the scenario of the application, the user may or not be aware of the operator’s involvement. The operator can communicate with the user based on audio/visual, or only audio, communication. This paper describes an application setup, which enables distant communication with the user, where the user is unaware of the operator’s involvement. A real-time viseme recognizer is needed to ensure a proper response from the agent. In addition, implementation of the embodied conversational agent Lili hosting an entertainment show, which is broadcast by RTV Slovenia, will be described in more detail. Employment of the embodied conversational agent as a virtual major-domo named Maja, within an intelligent ambience, using speech recognition system and TTS system PLATTOS, will be also described.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Brill, E.,: A Corpus-Based Approach to Language Learning. PhD thesis (1993)
Bulyko, I.: Unit Selection for Speech Synthesis Using Splicing Cost with Weighted Finite State Transducers. In: Proc. of Eurospeech (2001)
Bulyko, I., Ostendorf, M.: Joint prosody prediction and unit selection for concatenative speech synthesis. In: Proc. of ICASSP (2001)
Emmanuel, R., Schabes, Y.: Finite State Language Processing. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1997)
Gauvain, J.-L., Lamel, L.F., Adda, G., Adda-Decker, M.: Speaker-independent continuous speech dictation. Speech Communication 15, 21–37 (1994)
Holzapfel, M.: Konkatenative Sprachsynthese mit grossen Datenbanken. Ph.D. thesis (2000)
Kačič, Z., Horvat, B., Zögling Markuš, A.: Issues in design and collection of large telephone speech corpus for Slovenian language. In: Gavirilidou, V., Maria (ur.) (ed.) Second international conference on language resources and evaluation. Proceedings. Athens: European Language Resources Association, Athens, Greece, May 31- June 2, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 943–946 (2000)
Mohri, M.: On Some Applications of Finite-State Automata Theory to Natural Language Processing. Natural Language Engineering 1 (1995)
Mohri, M., Sproat, R.: An efficient compiler for weighted rewrite rules. In: 34-th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 1996, Santa Cruz, California (1996)
Taylor, P., Black, A., Caley, R.: Heterogeneous Relation Graphs as a Mechanism for Representing Linguistic Information. Speech Communication 33, 153–174 (2001)
Rojc, M.: Time and Space efficient structure of multilingual and polyglot TTS system – architecture with finite-state machines, PhD thesis (2003)
Rojc, M., Kačič, Z.: Time and Space-Efficient Architecture for a Corpus-based Text-to-Speech Synthesis System. Speech Communication 49(3), 230–249 (2007)
Spens, K.-E., Agelfors, E., Beskow, J., Granström, B., Karlsson, I., Salvi, G.: SYNFACE, a talking head telephone for the hearing impaired. In: Proc. IFHOH. 7th World Congress, Helsinki, Finland (2004)
Sproat, R.: Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (1998)
Sproat, R., Riley, M.: Compilation of Weighted Finite-State Transducers from Decision Trees. In: Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 215–222 (1996)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rojc, M., Rotovnik, T., Brus, M., Jan, D., Kačič, Z. (2007). Embodied Conversational Agents in Wizard-of-Oz and Multimodal Interaction Applications. In: Esposito, A., Faundez-Zanuy, M., Keller, E., Marinaro, M. (eds) Verbal and Nonverbal Communication Behaviours. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4775. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76442-7_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76442-7_26
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-76441-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-76442-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)