Interacting with a semantic affective ECA

Abstract

This paper presents an affective enhanced semantic ECA named E-VOX. The core of E-VOX is a cognitive-affective architecture based on Soar and extended with an affective model inspired by ALMA, that takes into account emotions, mood, and personality. E-VOX works as an assistant to provide useful information from Wikipedia, supporting real-feel human-computer interaction. User interaction with the ECA is explained and first tests with users are shown. These tests have revealed that the ECA is perceived as useful, easy to use and entertaining. Thanks to the cognitive-affective architecture, the agent’s behavior is modulated its personality, influencing agent-user interaction and the perception of the agent by the user. The agent’s emotional behavior has been perceived by users as realistic though not always sufficiently expressive.