A conversational agent that reacts to vocal signals

Abstract

Conversational agents are increasingly being used for training of social skills. One of their most important benefits is their ability to provide natural interaction with humans. This work proposes to extend conversational agents’ benefits for social skills training by analysing the emotion conveyed by the user’s speech. For that, we developed a new system that captures emotions from human voice and, combined with the context of a particular situation, uses this to influence the internal state of the agent and change its behaviour. An example of the system’s use is shown and its limitations and advantages are discussed, together with the internal workflow of the system.