Taking into account that the user acceptance of an animated agent is influenced by different criteria, including appropriateness of the application domain, quality of application design, and quality of character design, we have developed a demo application in a domain where we found the agent substantially helpful - a web-based city guide. The animated character interactively guides the user through some sights of the city of Darmstadt. It can display and explain how to get to different places of interest by moving around and pointing at locations on a map. The system allows input via mouse clicks, speech and typed text. Output modalities of the agent are speech, gesture, text (cartoon word balloons) and some facial expression. Further we have designed two new 3D characters. We describe experiences gained during system development and discuss design aspects concerning application as well as character animation.
Cite as: Fries, G., Feldes, S., Corbet, A. (1998) Using an animated talking character in a web-based city guide demonstrator. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 1024, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-264
@inproceedings{fries98_icslp,
author={Georg Fries and Stefan Feldes and Alfred Corbet},
title={{Using an animated talking character in a web-based city guide demonstrator}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 1024},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-264}
}