Enhancing the Believability of Embodied Conversational Agents through Environment-, Self- and Interaction-Awareness

Ijaz, K., Bogdanovych, A. and Simoff, S.

Research on embodied conversational agents’ reasoning and actions has mostly ignored the external environment. This papers argues that believability of such agents is tightly connected with their ability to relate to the environment during a conversation. This ability, defined as awareness believability, is formalised in terms of three components environment-, self- and interaction-awareness. The paper presents a method enabling virtual agents to reason about their environment, understand the interaction capabilities of other participants, own goals and current state of the environment, as well as to include these elements into conversations. We present the implementation of the method and a case study, which demonstrates that such abilities improve the overall believability of virtual agents.

Cite as: Ijaz, K., Bogdanovych, A. and Simoff, S. (2011). Enhancing the Believability of Embodied Conversational Agents through Environment-, Self- and Interaction-Awareness. In Proc. Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC 2011) Perth, Australia. CRPIT, 113. Mark Reynolds Eds., ACS. 107-116

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