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Building Spoken Dialogue Systems for Believable Characters

Believable characters are defined in the arts as autonomous characters with personality, capable of showing emotion, being self-motivated rather than eventdriven, adaptable to new situations, maintaining consistency of expression, and able to interact with other characters. These requirements impose a number of conversational capabilities on a spoken dialogue interface with a believable character: the character should react on its name, it should give subtle signals when it is listening or wants to take the turn, and it should allow interruptions while it is talking. Implementing these conversational aspects of believability presupposes a flexible architecture capable of dealing with asynchronous processes. Most of today’s spoken dialogue systems exhibit a pipelined architecture and even software agent-based architectures with the potential to function asynchronously work in practice as a pipeline approach. Spoken interaction with a believable character is, in the simplest case, replacing the speech synthesis component with a module that captures both the animation of the character plus speech synthesis. It is obvious that processing on a purely sequential basis wouldn’t meet the requirements for believability—this paper introduces a dialogue system based on an asynchronous agent architecture developed within the MagiCster project, aiming to display the aforementioned believable aspects.