Conversational Sales Assistants

believable embodied agents requires an awareness of context and the capability to communicate with speech and gestures. We are concerned with developing such agents for use as sales assistants in a virtual marketplace. We employ a communication model which takes a public perspective on the meaning of communicative acts to enhance the agent's social awareness. Additionally the agent draws private inferences to build a model of the user. The agent uses a BDI model to reason about its contextual information and plan communicative acts. The speech and gestures generated by the agent are integrated using a script language. We contend that the integration of these components will help us to achieve contextual embodied agents.