Elckerlyc goes mobile: enabling technology for ECAs in mobile applications

The fast growth of computational resources and speech technology available on mobile devices makes it pos- sible for users of these devices to interact with service sys- tems through natural dialogue. These systems are sometimes perceived as social agents and presented by means of an animated embodied conversational agent (ECA). To take the full advantage of the power of ECAs in service systems, it is important to support real-time, online and responsive interaction with the system through the ECA. The design of responsive animated conversational agents is a daunting task. Elckerlyc is a model-based platform for the specification and animation of synchronised multimodal responsive animated agents. This paper presents a new light-weight PictureEngine that allows this platform to embed an ECA in the user interface of mobile applications. The ECA can be specified by using the behavior markup language (BML). An application and user evaluations of Elckerlyc and the PictureEngine in a mobile embedded digital coach is presented.

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