More Than Just Another Pretty Face: Embodied Conversational Interface Agents

Introduction Both animals and humans manifest social qualities. Dogs recognize dominance and submission, stand corrected by their superiors, demonstrate consistent personalities, and so forth. On the other hand, only humans communicate using language, and carry on conversations with one another. And the skills of conversation have developed in humans in such a way as to exploit all of the unique affordances of the human body. We make complex representational gestures with our prehensile hands, gaze away and towards one another out of the corners of our centrally-set eyes, and use the pitch and melody of our flexible voices to emphasize and clarify what we are saying. Perhaps because conversation is so defining of humanness and human interaction, the metaphor of face-to-face conversation has been applied to human-computer interface design for quite some time. One of the early arguments for the utility of this metaphor gave a list of features of face-to-face conversation that could be fruitfully applied to human-computer interaction, including mixed initiative, non-verbal communication, sense of presence, rules for transfer of control ([9]). However, although these features have gained widespread recognition, human – computer conversation has only very recently become more than a metaphor. That is, it is only just recently that designers have taken the metaphor seriously enough to attempt to design a computer that could hold up its end of the conversation.