The Virtual Human Max - Modeling Embodied Conversation

The Artificial Intelligence group at Bielefeld University has been developing the virtual human Max to study how the natural conversational behavior of humans can be modeled and made available for A.I. systems. This research activity embarks on the goal of building holistic, embodied agents that can engage with humans in face-toface conversation and demonstrate many of the same communicative behaviors as displayed by humans. This activity has been pursued in a row of projects during which Max’s conversational capabilities have been (and are being) steadily extended, allowing the employment of the agent in increasingly challenging scenarios. Originally started out as a platform for simulating speech and gesture generation [4], we brought Max to an application as a virtual receptionist that welcomes people in the hallway of our lab [3]. In the SFB 360 Situated Artificial Communicators, Max was utilized to study aspects of situated communication and collaborative, mixed-initiative dialogue in a VR construction task [6]. Since January 2004, Max has been applied in the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum (HNF), a public computer museum in Paderborn (Germany), making the step from a lab-inhabiting research prototype to a system being confronted daily with real humans in a real-world setting [5].