Designing Animated Agents as Social Actors and Dramatis Personae for Web-based Interaction

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in employing animated agents for tasks that are typically performed by humans. They serve as communicative partners in a variety of applications, such as tutoring systems, sales, or entertainment. This paper discusses design principles for animated agents to enhance their effectiveness as tutors, sales persons, or actors, among other roles. It is argued that agents should support their perception as social actors by displaying human-like social cues and as dramatis personae by facilitating a narrative interpretation of events. We will describe an architecture for emotionbased agents and requirements for narrative intelligence in agents and environments. A simplified version of our model will be illustrated by two interaction scenarios that feature cartoon-style characters and can be run in a web browser. key words: Conversational agents, human-like and believable qualities of agents, narrative intelligence, emotion and personality, agent modeling, web-based environments.