The GESTYLE Language

GESTYLE is a new markup language to annotate text which has to be spoken by Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA), to prescribe the usage of hand-, headand facial gestures accompanying the speech in order to augment the communication. The annotation ranges from low level (e.g. perform a specific gesture) to high level (e.g. take turn in a conversation) instructions. On top of that, and central to GESTYLE is the notion of style which determines the gesture repertoire and the gesturing manner of the ECA. GESTYLE contains constructs to define and dynamically modify style. The low-level tags, prescribing specific gestures to be performed are generated automatically, based on the style definition and the high-level tags. By using GESTYLE, different aspects of gesturing of an ECA can be defined and tailored to the needs of different application situations or user groups.