"How about this weather?"
Social Dialog with Embodied Conversational Agents

Timothy Bickmore
Justine Cassell

Abstract Social dialogue can be used by an embodied interface agent both to satisfy "interpersonal" goals, such as building rapport with the user and demonstrating the expertise of the agent, and to directly or indirectly satisfy task goals, such as acquiring background information about the user. We describe the ongoing development of an embodied conversational 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 used. An approach to discourse planning for social dialogue is described, along with an implementation and preliminary evaluation.