Virtual Agents for Professional Social Skills Training: An Overview of the State-of-the-Art

Training of interpersonal communication skills is typically done using role play, by practising relevant scenarios with the help of professional actors. However, as a result of the rapid developments in human-computer interaction, there has been an increasing interest in the use of computers for training of social and communicative skills. This type of training offers opportunities to complement traditional training methods with a novel paradigm that is more scalable and cost-effective. The main idea of such applications is that of a simulated conversation between a human trainee and a virtual agent. By developing the system in such a way that the communicative behaviour of the human has a direct impact on the behaviour of the virtual agent, an interactive learning experience is created. In this article, we review the current state-of-the-art in virtual agents for social skills training. We provide an overview of existing applications, and discuss various properties of these applications.