Companions - Intelligent, Persistent, Personalised Multimodal Interfaces to the Internet

The Companions Project

To make computer interfaces more human-like has been a longstanding goal of human-computer interaction research, which has influenced all major areas of Multimodal Interfaces, from speech understanding to emotion recognition. This endeavour has given rise to the concept of agent-based interfaces, ones in which the user communicates with a virtual character using multimodal dialogue.

These are often referred to as Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), to emphasise how the use of a character could focus natural language interaction as well as the affective component of the interface. The context of the COMPANIONS project concerns ECAs as persistent companions for users in carrying out activities within their personal digital space, such as organising image and text records of their lives as coherent narratives. This will require extending multimodal dialogue capabilities to support the social and affective aspects of interaction, as well as to give them specific cognitive capabilities, so as to support their relation to the user and organise information. The emotional aspects of the interface will be similarly grounded in the linguistic performance of human-computer dialogue, extended to such aspects as politeness and humour.