Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) represent a sophisticated type of intelligent user interface that integrates gestures, facial expressions, and speech to facilitate direct communication with users. This state-of-the-art technology aims to enrich user-computer interactions by offering an immersive and compelling experience, particularly in conversational tasks. Beyond verbal communication, ECAs also employ non-verbal channels, thereby enhancing the overall communication process. They find extensive application in diverse areas such as computer games, virtual training platforms, and interactive storytelling systems. However, their presence is noticeably lacking in popular virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa. The adoption of ECAs is currently under investigation in AI advancements in virtual realities, with an emphasis on rendering AI more human-like. However, they pose challenges including achieving a balance between realism and efficiency, overcoming computational constraints, addressing ethical issues, ensuring user acceptance, and controlling uncertainties in AI behavior. Despite these hurdles, ECAs hold the promise to transform virtual experiences and shape future AI research.
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In artificial intelligence, an embodied agent, also sometimes referred to as an interface agent, 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).
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