Michio Okada

Talking Eye: Autonomous creatures for augmented chatting

Abstract This paper describes an interactive system called “Talking Eye”, which casually chats with humans via speech voice, and reports the results of a psychological experiment to evaluate social behaviors on interaction with the Talking Eye system. We have been investigating the mechanism of chatting in order to create local interaction between humans and computers through the dialogue process. We have constructed a prototype system, i.e., Talking Eye, with a mechanism for producing conversational behaviors according to the current situation using a multi-agent architecture. The results of experiments have demonstrated that humans can find affinity with the system through the process of interaction even if the conversational purpose is not achieved; the result of deriving conversational behaviors from the current situation based on an architecture with multi-agents. The main goal of this study is to build autonomous creatures with a mechanism to promote further empathic interaction with humans.

Talking Eye: autonomous creature as accomplice for human

The most conventional approach to a speech based interface has been to achieve an explicit goal as a result of spoken dialogue. On the other hand spoken dialogue has also another aspect: the simple enjoyment of making conversation with participants, a typical example being casual chatting. This aspect offers a key for creating a new style of autonomous agent, which appears not as a human assistant but as a human accomplice or conversational partner. We present an autonomous creature called Talking Eyes, which has the advantage of a property of chatting. We performed a preliminary examination using subjects to illustrate the effectiveness of the interaction with Talking Eyes. The results suggested that they could enjoy the interaction with Talking Eyes even if they could not accomplish their purpose. The main goal of this work is to build autonomous creatures with a mechanism to promote a more consensual feeling through its interaction with humans.