Empirical Studies on Embodied Conversational Agents

ion It is important that the proposed middleware be independent of proprietary solutions and specific platforms. The specification of ECA behavior should provide predictable rendering results across platforms with varied graphics and speech capabilities. Therefore, MECA should abstract itself from the multimodal technology used for character animation, speech synthesis, and input gathering. Special attention should be paid to what would be required for a standard targeting a greater base of applications. Application independent technology should be used for the implementation of such middleware. This will allow applications developed with MECA free to use or ignore the level of detail that is specific to the applications.