Lifelike Computer Characters

By: Aryan RathoreHead Of Aryan Dell Corporation JaipurAryan Computer Organization JaipurMob:- 8560089002

• Many software agent researchers are content to make agents that are merely “useful,”

• Others seek the more ambitious goal of making “complete” agents that are • highly visible in the user interface, • project the illusion of being aware and

intentioned, • and are capable of emotions and significant

social interaction.

The Persona Project at Microsoft

The Persona project (Ball et al. 1997) was formed to prototype possible interfaces to future computer-based assistants, in this case a “conversational, anthropomorphic computer character that will interact with the user to accept task assignments and report results.”

Personal Digital Parrot One, PDP1, or Peedy for

short• An animated character that acts as a

knowledgeable compact disc changer.• Peedy responds verbally and by doing things to

spoken commands in a restricted subset of natural language.

• “The assistant can be queried as to what CDs are available by artist, title or genre, additional information can be obtained about the CDs, and a playlist can be generated.”

• To be successful, such assistants will need to support • interactive give and take including task

negotiation and clarifying questions, • understand how and when it is appropriate

to interrupt the user with a report or request for input,

• and acknowledge the social and emotional impacts of interaction.

Challenges

• The creation of lifelike computer characters requires • A wide variety of technologies and skills,

including speech recognition, natural language understanding, animation, and speech synthesis.

• A sophisticated understanding of subtle dialogue mechanisms and social psychology is also essential.

• Necessary computational machinery be able to run with acceptable performance on different variety computing platforms.

Two major technology components

• Reactive animation• and natural language

• The most interesting aspect of the animation is its reactivity, i.e., the fact that complex behaviors, including “emotion,” can be triggered by user input.

• The natural language capability relies on the Whisper speech recognition module and on a broad-coverage natural language parser.