Toward a universal platform for integrating embodied conversational agent components

Abstract

Embodied Conversational Agents (EGAs) are computer generated life-like characters that interact with human users in face-to-face conversations. To achieve natural multi-modal conversations, EGA systems are very sophisticated and require many building assemblies and thus are difficult for individual research groups to develop. This paper proposes a generic architecture, the Universal EGA Framework, which is currently under development and includes a blackboard-based platform, a high-level protocol to integrate general purpose EGA components and ease EGA system prototyping. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.