Communicating with multiple users for embodied conversational agents

One of the most critical reason that prevents embodied conversational agents to be used in practical applications can be considered as the lack of the capabilities to be aware of multiple users and to interact with them. This paper presents our investigations in an advanced tour guide agent system serving two users and a simpler quiz agent kiosk which is developed for public exhibitions. To improve the life-likeness of the agents, we propose that the agent should be attentive to its users. To achieve the agent's attentiveness toward the users, two aspects are considered: its utterance strategy toward the users and its internal attitude should be adaptive to users' status. To explore these two aspects more throughly, two prototype systems are implemented and evaluated with subject experiments respectively. In addition to regular questionnaires evaluation, GNAT test that measures implicit preference was conducted as well. The preliminary results implied that the experiment participants perceived that the agents are attentive and natural.