Virtual Museum Guides demonstration
William Swartout, David R. Traum, Ron Artstein, Dan Noren, Paul E. Debevec, Kerry Bronnenkant, Josh Williams, Anton Leuski, Shrikanth Shri Narayanan, Diane Piepol, Chad Lane, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, Priti Aggarwal, Matt Liewer, Jen-Yuan Chiang, Jillian Gerten, Selina Chu, Kyle White · 2010
The Virtual Museum Guides are two virtual humans set in an exhibit at the Museum of Science, Boston, designed to promote interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The primary audience is children between ages 7 to 14, in particular females and other groups under-represented in STEM.The Guides are based on and extend the approach used in the SGT Star character and the Gunslinger project. To interact with the characters, an operator presses a push-totalk button and speaks into a microphone. An audio acquisition client then sends audio to the automatic speech recognizer (ASR), which creates hypotheses of the words that were said, and then sends this text to the Language Understanding (LU) module.