DTask and litebody: Open source, standards-based tools for building web-deployed embodied conversational agents

Abstract

Two tools for developing embodied conversational agents and deploying them over the world-wide web to standard web browsers are presented. DTask is a hierarchical task decomposition-based dialogue planner, based on the CEA-2018 task description language standard. LiteBody is an extensible, web-based BML renderer that runs in most contemporary web browsers with no additional software and provides a conversational virtual agent with a range of conversational nonverbal behavior adequate for many user-agent interaction applications. Together, these tools provide a complete platform for deploying web-based conversational agents, and are actively being used on two health counseling applications. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.