Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Gamified Environments

Gamification aims at improving people's motivation and performance in certain tasks by introducing different mechanics taken from traditional games. Gamification has been successfully applied in different domains, such as education, marketing, and the workplace. In this paper we present an intelligent virtual assistant for gamified environments. This assistant will provide the players with help on the tasks they have to complete using natural language dialogues. The intelligent virtual assistant includes other advances technologies, such as sentiment analysis, and player's profile and interaction network analysis. This allows the assistant to analyze the sentiment polarity of each message submitted by the user, and to adapt its dialogues accordingly. It also allows the assistant to have knowledge about each player, including basic personal data and their social network. This allows the assistant to use those data in the dialogues to, for example, suggest players to ask for help to their friends, or even to suggest new friends to a player. We also present a case study in which the intelligent virtual assistant has been introduced in the gamified environment of a real company.