AMBROSIO: THE MIMUS TALKING HEAD
Pilar Manchón, Antonio Ávila, David Ávila, Guillermo Pérez, Gabriel Amores · 2007
In a technology-driven world where HCI is developing fast and the research on Multimodal Dialogue Systems is substantial, personality endowed virtual characters are acquiring importance. Socio-psychological research [4] indicates that users are in general more willing to interact with technology when the latter is ‘humanized’, that is, when the interaction is closer to that between humans. In this paper, the integration of a talking head in MIMUS, a home-control multimodal dialogue system, is presented. Also known as ‘Ambrosio’, the MIMUS talking head in synchronized with state-of-the-art synthesizers and provides a full range of facial expressions and motions. A preliminary evaluation of the talking head impact on the overall system perception seems to confirm the benefits of integrating virtual characters in this type of systems. Index Terms—Multimodal dialogue systems and interfaces, HCI, human factors, talking heads, personality, 1.