Embodied agent

Last updated October 08, 2023

In artificial intelligence, an embodied agent, also sometimes referred to as an interface agent,^[1] is an intelligent agent that interacts with the environment through a physical body within that environment. Agents that are represented graphically with a body, for example a human or a cartoon animal, are also called embodied agents, although they have only virtual, not physical, embodiment. A branch of artificial intelligence focuses on empowering such agents to interact autonomously with human beings and the environment. Mobile robots are one example of physically embodied agents; Ananova and Microsoft Agent are examples of graphically embodied agents. Embodied conversational agents are embodied agents (usually with a graphical front-end as opposed to a robotic body) that are capable of engaging in conversation with one another and with humans employing the same verbal and nonverbal means that humans do (such as gesture, facial expression, and so forth).

Embodied conversational agents

Embodied conversational agents^[2] are a form of intelligent user interface. Graphically embodied agents aim to unite gesture, facial expression and speech to enable face-to-face communication with users, providing a powerful means of human-computer interaction.

Advantages

Face-to-face communication allows communication protocols that give a much richer communication channel than other means of communicating. It enables pragmatic communication acts such as conversational turn-taking, facial expression of emotions, information structure and emphasis, visualisation and iconic gestures, and orientation in a three-dimensional environment. This communication takes place through both verbal and non-verbal channels such as gaze, gesture, spoken intonation and body posture.

Research has found that users prefer a non-verbal visual indication of an embodied system's internal state to a verbal indication,^[3] demonstrating the value of additional non-verbal communication channels. As well as this, the face-to-face communication involved in interacting with an embodied agent can be conducted alongside another task without distracting the human participants, instead improving the enjoyment of such an interaction.^[4] Furthermore, the use of an embodied presentation agent results in improved recall of the presented information.^[5]

Embodied agents also provide a social dimension to the interaction. Humans willingly ascribe social awareness to computers,^[6] and thus interaction with embodied agents follows social conventions, similar to human to human interactions. This social interaction both raises the believability and perceived trustworthiness of agents, and increases the user's engagement with the system.^[7] Rickenberg and Reeves found that the presence of an embodied agent on a website increased the level of user trust in that website, but also increased users' anxiety and affected their performance, as if they were being watched by a real human.^[8] Another effect of the social aspect of agents is that presentations given by an embodied agent are perceived as being more entertaining and less difficult than similar presentations given without an agent.^[7] Research shows that perceived enjoyment, followed by perceived usefulness and ease of use, is the major factor influencing user adoption of embodied agents.^[9]

A study in January 2004 by Byron Reeves at Stanford demonstrated how digital characters could "enhance online experiences" through explaining how virtual characters essentially add a sense of relatability to the user experience and make it more approachable. This increase in likability in turn helps make the products better, which benefits both the end users and those creating the product. ^[10]

Applications

The rich style of communication that characterises human conversation makes conversational interaction with embodied conversational agents ideal for many non-traditional interaction tasks. A familiar application of graphically embodied agents is computer games; embodied agents are ideal for this setting because the richer communication style makes interacting with the agent enjoyable. Embodied conversational agents have also been used in virtual training environments, portable personal navigation guides, interactive fiction and storytelling systems, interactive online characters and automated presenters and commentators.^{[ citation needed ]}

Major virtual assistants like Siri, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant do not come with any visual embodied representation, which is believed to limit the sense of human presence by users.^[11]

The U.S. Department of Defense utilizes a software agent called SGT STAR on U.S. Army-run Web sites and Web applications for site navigation, recruitment and propaganda purposes. Sgt. Star is run by the Army Marketing and Research Group, a division operated directly from The Pentagon. Sgt. Star is based upon the ActiveSentry technology developed by Next IT, a Washington-based information technology services company. Other such bots in the Sgt. Star "family" are utilized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency for intelligence gathering purposes.^[12]^[13]

Related Research Articles

In computer science, the ELIZA effect is the tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — into computer programs that have a textual interface. The effect is a category mistake that arises when the program's symbolic computations are described through terms such as "think", "know" or "understand."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">User interface</span> Means by which a user interacts with and controls a machine

In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine from the human end, while the machine simultaneously feeds back information that aids the operators' decision-making process. Examples of this broad concept of user interfaces include the interactive aspects of computer operating systems, hand tools, heavy machinery operator controls and process controls. The design considerations applicable when creating user interfaces are related to, or involve such disciplines as, ergonomics and psychology.

A chatbot is a software application or web interface that aims to mimic human conversation through text or voice interactions. Modern chatbots are typically online and use artificial intelligence (AI) systems that are capable of maintaining a conversation with a user in natural language and simulating the way a human would behave as a conversational partner. Such technologies often utilize aspects of deep learning and natural language processing, but more simplistic chatbots have been around for decades prior.

Gesture recognition is an area of research and development in computer science and language technology concerned with the recognition and interpretation of human gestures. A subdiscipline of computer vision, it employs mathematical algorithms to interpret gestures. Gestures can originate from any bodily motion or state, but commonly originate from the face or hand. One area of the field is emotion recognition derived from facial expressions and hand gestures. Users can make simple gestures to control or interact with devices without physically touching them. Many approaches have been made using cameras and computer vision algorithms to interpret sign language, however, the identification and recognition of posture, gait, proxemics, and human behaviors is also the subject of gesture recognition techniques. Gesture recognition is a path for computers to begin to better understand and interpret human body language, previously not possible through text or unenhanced graphical (GUI) user interfaces.

Multimodal interaction provides the user with multiple modes of interacting with a system. A multimodal interface provides several distinct tools for input and output of data.

A voice-user interface (VUI) enables spoken human interaction with computers, using speech recognition to understand spoken commands and answer questions, and typically text to speech to play a reply. A voice command device is a device controlled with a voice user interface.

A dialogue system, or conversational agent (CA), is a computer system intended to converse with a human. Dialogue systems employed one or more of text, speech, graphics, haptics, gestures, and other modes for communication on both the input and output channel.

Justine M. Cassell is an American professor and researcher interested in human-human conversation, human-computer interaction, and storytelling. Since August 2010 she has been on the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and the Language Technologies Institute, with courtesy appointments in Psychology, and the Center for Neural Bases of Cognition.

A virtual assistant (VA) is a software agent that can perform a range of tasks or services for a user based on user input such as commands or questions, including verbal ones. Such technologies often incorporate chatbot capabilities to simulate human conversation, such as via online chat, to facilitate interaction with their users. The interaction may be via text, graphical interface, or voice - as some virtual assistants are able to interpret human speech and respond via synthesized voices.

Human–computer interaction (HCI) is research in the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and computers. HCI researchers observe the ways humans interact with computers and design technologies that allow humans to interact with computers in novel ways. A device that allows interaction between human being and a computer is known as a "Human-computer Interface (HCI)".

Virtual intelligence (VI) is the term given to artificial intelligence that exists within a virtual world. Many virtual worlds have options for persistent avatars that provide information, training, role playing, and social interactions.

The Rich Representation Language, often abbreviated as RRL, is a computer animation language specifically designed to facilitate the interaction of two or more animated characters. The research effort was funded by the European Commission as part of the NECA Project. The NECA framework within which RRL was developed was not oriented towards the animation of movies, but the creation of intelligent "virtual characters" that interact within a virtual world and hold conversations with emotional content, coupled with suitable facial expressions.

The NECA Project was a research project that focused on multimodal communication with animated agents in a virtual world. NECA was funded by the European Commission from 1998 to 2002 and the research results were published up to 2005.

Elizabeth Frances Churchill is a British American psychologist specializing in human-computer interaction (HCI) and social computing. She is a Director of User Experience at Google. She has held a number of positions in the ACM including Secretary Treasurer from 2016 to 2018, and Executive Vice President from 2018 to 2020.

A pedagogical agent is a concept borrowed from computer science and artificial intelligence and applied to education, usually as part of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). It is a simulated human-like interface between the learner and the content, in an educational environment. A pedagogical agent is designed to model the type of interactions between a student and another person. Mabanza and de Wet define it as "a character enacted by a computer that interacts with the user in a socially engaging manner". A pedagogical agent can be assigned different roles in the learning environment, such as tutor or co-learner, depending on the desired purpose of the agent. "A tutor agent plays the role of a teacher, while a co-learner agent plays the role of a learning companion".

Nadine is a gynoid humanoid social robot that is modelled on Professor Nadia Magnenat Thalmann. The robot has a strong human-likeness with a natural-looking skin and hair and realistic hands. Nadine is a socially intelligent robot which returns a greeting, makes eye contact, and can remember all the conversations had with it. It is able to answer questions autonomously in several languages, simulate emotions both in gestures and facially, depending on the content of the interaction with the user. Nadine can recognise persons it has previously seen, and engage in flowing conversation. Nadine has been programmed with a "personality", in that its demeanour can change according to what is said to it. Nadine has a total of 27 degrees of freedom for facial expressions and upper body movements. With persons it has previously encountered, it remembers facts and events related to each person. It can assist people with special needs by reading stories, showing images, put on Skype sessions, send emails, and communicate with other members of the family. It can play the role of a receptionist in an office or be dedicated to be a personal coach.

An echoborg is a person whose words and actions are determined, in whole or in part, by an artificial intelligence (AI).

A conversational user interface (CUI) is a user interface for computers that emulates a conversation with a real human. Historically, computers have relied on text-based user interfaces and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to translate the user's desired action into commands the computer understands. While an effective mechanism of completing computing actions, there is a learning curve for the user associated with GUI. Instead, CUIs provide opportunity for the user to communicate with the computer in their natural language rather than in a syntax specific commands.

Elisabeth André is a German Computer Scientist from Saarlouis, Saarland who specializes in Intelligent User Interfaces, Virtual Agents, and Social Computing.

A software bot is a type of software agent in the service of software project management and software engineering. A software bot has an identity and potentially personified aspects in order to serve their stakeholders. Software bots often compose software services and provide an alternative user interface, which is sometimes, but not necessarily conversational.

References

↑ Duan, Jiafei; Yu, Samson; Tan, Hui Li; Zhu, Hongyuan; Tan, Cheston (2022), "A survey of embodied ai: From simulators to research tasks" , IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, 6 (2): 230–244
↑ Cassell, Justine; Prevost, Scott; Sullivan, Joseph; Churchill, Elizabeth (2000), Embodied Conversational Agents, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
↑ Marsi, Erwin; van Rooden, Ferdi, "Expressing uncertainty with a talking head in a multimodal question-answering system" (PDF), ILK Research Group, archived from the original (PDF) on July 20, 2011^{[ dead link ]}
↑ Kipp, Michael; Kipp, Kerstin H.; Ndiaye, Alassane; Patrick (2006), "Evaluating the tangible interface and virtual characters in the interactive COHIBIT exhibit." (PDF), Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'06), Springer-Verlag, pp. 434–444
↑ Beun, Robbert-Jan; de Vos, Eveliene; Witteman, Cilia (2003), "Embodied conversational agents: Effects on memory performance and anthropomorphisation." (PDF), Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents 2003, Springer-Verlag, pp. 315–319
↑ Nass, Clifford; Steuer, Jonathan; Tauber, Ellen R. (1994), "Computers are social actors", CHI '94: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, New York, NY, USA: ACM Press, pp. 72–78
1 2 van Mulken, Susanne; André, Elisabeth; Müller, Jochen (1988), "The persona effect: How substantial is it?" (PDF), HCI '98: Proceedings of HCI on People and Computers XIII, London, UK: Springer-Verlag, pp. 53–66
↑ Rickenberg, Raoul; Reeves, Byron (2000), "The effects of animated characters on anxiety, task performance, and evaluations of user interfaces.", CHI '00: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, New York, NY, USA: ACM Press, pp. 49–56
↑ Serenko, Alexander (2008), "A model of user adoption of interface agents for email notification" (PDF), Interacting with Computers, 20 (4–5): 461–472, doi:10.1016/j.intcom.2008.04.004.
↑ "The Benefits of Interactive Online Characters". Byron Reeves, Stanford University.
↑ Kevin K. Bowden; Tommy Nilsson; Christine P. Spencer; Kubra Cengiz; Alexandru Ghitulescu; Jelte B. van Waterschoot. "I Probe, Therefore I Am: Designing a Virtual Journalist with Human Emotions" (PDF). Proceedings of eNTERFACE'16, Enschede, July 18th – August 12th, 2016
↑ Maass, Dave (April 18, 2014). "Answers and Questions About Military, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence Agency Chatbots". eff.org. Electronic Frontier Foundation . Retrieved February 5, 2015. Sgt. Star is the U.S. Army's dedicated marketing and recruitment chatbot, and he isn't going to turn whistleblower any time soon.
↑ Maass, Dave (January 31, 2014). "Free Sgt. Star: Army Ignores FOIA Request for Artificial Intelligence Records". eff.org. Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved February 5, 2015.

External links

"AI Makes Strides in Virtual Worlds More Like Our Own". Quanta Magazine . June 24, 2022.

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[1] Duan, Jiafei; Yu, Samson; Tan, Hui Li; Zhu, Hongyuan; Tan, Cheston (2022), "A survey of embodied ai: From simulators to research tasks" , IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, 6 (2): 230–244

[2] Cassell, Justine; Prevost, Scott; Sullivan, Joseph; Churchill, Elizabeth (2000), Embodied Conversational Agents, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

[3] Marsi, Erwin; van Rooden, Ferdi, "Expressing uncertainty with a talking head in a multimodal question-answering system" (PDF), ILK Research Group, archived from the original (PDF) on July 20, 2011^{[ dead link ]}

[4] Kipp, Michael; Kipp, Kerstin H.; Ndiaye, Alassane; Patrick (2006), "Evaluating the tangible interface and virtual characters in the interactive COHIBIT exhibit." (PDF), Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'06), Springer-Verlag, pp. 434–444

[5] Beun, Robbert-Jan; de Vos, Eveliene; Witteman, Cilia (2003), "Embodied conversational agents: Effects on memory performance and anthropomorphisation." (PDF), Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents 2003, Springer-Verlag, pp. 315–319

[6] Nass, Clifford; Steuer, Jonathan; Tauber, Ellen R. (1994), "Computers are social actors", CHI '94: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, New York, NY, USA: ACM Press, pp. 72–78

[persona-7] 1 2 van Mulken, Susanne; André, Elisabeth; Müller, Jochen (1988), "The persona effect: How substantial is it?" (PDF), HCI '98: Proceedings of HCI on People and Computers XIII, London, UK: Springer-Verlag, pp. 53–66

[8] Rickenberg, Raoul; Reeves, Byron (2000), "The effects of animated characters on anxiety, task performance, and evaluations of user interfaces.", CHI '00: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, New York, NY, USA: ACM Press, pp. 49–56

[9] Serenko, Alexander (2008), "A model of user adoption of interface agents for email notification" (PDF), Interacting with Computers, 20 (4–5): 461–472, doi:10.1016/j.intcom.2008.04.004.

[The_Benefits_of_Interactive_Online_Characters-10] "The Benefits of Interactive Online Characters". Byron Reeves, Stanford University.

[11] Kevin K. Bowden; Tommy Nilsson; Christine P. Spencer; Kubra Cengiz; Alexandru Ghitulescu; Jelte B. van Waterschoot. "I Probe, Therefore I Am: Designing a Virtual Journalist with Human Emotions" (PDF). Proceedings of eNTERFACE'16, Enschede, July 18th – August 12th, 2016

[12] Maass, Dave (April 18, 2014). "Answers and Questions About Military, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence Agency Chatbots". eff.org. Electronic Frontier Foundation . Retrieved February 5, 2015. Sgt. Star is the U.S. Army's dedicated marketing and recruitment chatbot, and he isn't going to turn whistleblower any time soon.

[13] Maass, Dave (January 31, 2014). "Free Sgt. Star: Army Ignores FOIA Request for Artificial Intelligence Records". eff.org. Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved February 5, 2015.

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