People engage in small talk and conversational
storytelling to provide information in engaging ways and to serve interpersonal
goals such as building rapport and credibility. Embodied conversational
interface agents, that represent the computer in its interaction with human
users by way of a graphical humanoid body on a screen, can also profitably
engage in these behaviors. We describe the ongoing development of an embodied
conversational interface agent that is capable of multimodal input understanding
and output generation and operates in a limited application domain in which
both social and task-oriented dialogue are important. We discuss our plans
for adding small talk and conversational storytelling capabilities to the
system, and the unique requirements these phenomena place on the understanding,
discourse planning, and generation components of a real-time conversational
interface.