MANA for the Ageing

We present a family of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) using Talking Head technology, along with a program of associated research and user trials. Whilst antecedents of our current ECAs include “chatbots” desgined to pass the Turing Test (TT) or win a Loebner Prize (LP), our current agents are task-oriented Teaching Agents and Social Companions. The current focus for our research includes the role of emotion, expression and gesture in our agents/companions, the explicit teaching of such social skills as recognizing and displaying appropriate expressions/gestures, and the integration of template/database-based dialogue managers with more conversational TT/LP systems as well as with audio-visual speech/gesture recognition/synthesis technologies.