Interactional Competency for Conversational Characters

Contents

Conversational characters are animated humanoids which interact with users using the modalities of human face-to-face conversation. Face-to-face conversation consists of information exchanges at the propositional layer--those things that contribute to the intended meaning of the speaker-and the interactional layer--those things that, among other functions, serve to regulate the flow of information among the interlocutors. We describe issues in developing such characters with multimodal communicative competencies at both the propositional and interactional levels.