ABSTRACT
Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are anthropomorphic virtual characters that can exhibit human-like interaction capabilities by using verbal and non-verbal communication via understanding and producing speech, gestures, and facial expressions. Embodied conversational agents are a type of multimodal interface where the modalities are the natural modalities of human conversation: speech, intonation, facial expressions, hand gestures, body movements. This and the next chapter cover conversational interfaces that use ECAs. This chapter provides background information about conversational/dialog systems and ECAs. The next chapter aims to demonstrate how to build conversational systems with ECAs that can handle task-oriented dialogs. We selected real-world health dialog as our example domain.
