I A3: Intelligent Affective Animated Agents

摘要

Information systems should be human-centered. Human-computer interface needs to be improved to make computers not only user-friendly but also enjoyable to interact with. Computers should be proactive and take initiatives. A step toward this direction is the construction of Intelligent Affective Animated Agents (IA3). Three essential components of IA3 are: The agent needs to recognize human emotion. Based on its understanding of human speech and emotional state, the agent needs to reason and decide on how to respond. The response needs to be manifested in the form of a synthetic talking face which exhibits emotion. In this paper, we describe our preliminary research results in these three areas. We believe that although challenging research issues remain, for restricted domains effective IA3 could be constructed in the near future.