Estuary: A Framework For Building Multimodal Low-Latency Real-Time Socially Interactive Agents
Spencer Lin, Basem Rizk, Miru Jun, Andy Artze, Caitlín Sullivan, Sharon Mozgai, Scott Fisher · 2024
The rise in capability and ubiquity of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has enabled its application to the field of Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs). Despite significant interest in leveraging modern AI-powered components in real-time SIA research, substantial friction remains due to the absence of a standardized and universal SIA framework. As such, we developed Estuary: a multimodal (text, audio, and soon video) framework which facilitates the development of low-latency, real-time SIAs. Estuary seeks to reduce repeat work between studies and to provide a flexible platform that can be run entirely off-cloud to maximize configurability, controllability, reproducibility of studies, and speed of agent response times. We achieve this by constructing a robust multimodal framework which incorporates current and future components seamlessly into a modular and interoperable architecture.