Architecture of a socio-conversational agent in virtual worlds

Virtual worlds are more and more populated with autonomous conversational agents embodying different roles like tutor, guide, or personal assistant. In order to create more engaging and natural interactions, these agents should be endowed with social capabilities such as expressing different social attitudes through their behaviors. In this paper, we present the architecture of a socio-conversational agent composed of communicative components to detect and respond verbally and non-verbally to the user's speech and to convey different social attitudes. This paper presents the main components of this architecture. These descrpitions are illustrated with scenarios of interaction.