Technische Fakultät - AG Wissensbasierte Systeme

Alignment and Turn-taking in Communicating with an Artificial Agent

Ipke Wachsmuth

Faculty of Technology
University of Bielefeld

ipke@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de

Max is a human-size virtual agent that employs synthetic speech, gesture, gaze, and facial display in multimodal dialogue with a human partner. So far, Max is employed in two settings, (1) a cooperative construction task where the joint goal is to build a model airplane, and (2) conversations with the visitors of a computer museum involving smalltalk and explanations about the exhibition. In the mixed-initiative dialogues involved in these settings, speech-gesture alignment as well as turn-taking abilities play a crucial part for Max to appear as a convincing communication partner. Basic mechanisms and examples will be discussed.

Talk: Bielefeld 09-07-2004