Olga - a conversational agent with gestures

The Olga project has developed an animated agent interface for information services. The interface combines a graphical interface, spoken dialogue and an animated 3D ‘human-like’ character for multimodal input and output. The interaction is intelligently managed using techniques derived from spoken dialogue but extended for the graphical modality. The Olga agent is innovative in combining a spoken dialogue system with a 3-D animated character using lip-synthronized synthetic speech and gesturing. Particular attention has been paid to ensuring that the behaviour of the agent is immediately comprehensible for the user. Synchronizing speech with mouth movements increases intelligibility, while facial and gesturing realize the agent’s internal states and focus of the dialogue.