A Review of the Development of Embodied Presentation Agents and Their Application Fields

Embodied conversational agents provide a promising option for presenting information to users. This contribution revisits a number of past and ongoing systems with animated characters that have been developed at DFKI. While in all systems the purpose of using characters is to convey information to the user, there are significant variations in the style of presentation and the assumed conversational setting. The spectrum of systems include systems that feature a single, TV-style presentation agent, dialogue systems, as well as systems that deploy multiple interactive characters. We also provide a technical view on these systems and sketch the underlying system architectures of each sample system.