Scripting Human-Agent Interactions in a Generic ECA Framework

Abstract

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are life-like CG charactersthat interact with human users in face-to-face conversations. Toachieve natural multi-modal conversations, ECA systems are sophisticatedand are composed with assemblies of various functions. They are thusdifficult for an individual research group to develop. To addressthis problem, we are developing a Generic ECA Framework to integratethose assemblies with each other seamlessly. It is composed witha low-level communication platform, a high-level protocol and a setof API libraries. With such a common framework, ECAs can be prototypedrapidly while research result sharing can be facilitated. This paperpresents the_concepts of this framework, protocol, and a script languagethat defines the behaviours of an ECA.