Building Credible Agents: Behaviour Influenced by Personality and Emotional Traits

How do we construct credible personalities? The current SAL (Sensitive Artificial Listeners) characters were constructed intuitively and can be unconvincing. In addressing a range of issues associated with this problem, this paper discusses a model of personality and associated emotional traits which are founded on sound psychological principles. We describe how the model was selected, and use a theoretical basis to explain characterization of agents. Our objective is to ensure that behavioural perception of a virtual agent credibly reflect aspects of the agent’s ‘actual’ personality as prescribed. This is necessary if our agents are to be capable of sustaining realistic interaction with human users. Whilst yet to be tested, a series of further studies will evaluate perception of credibility by human viewers.