Enhancing Conversational Access to Information through a Socially Intelligent Agent

Embedding the HCI technology with human preferences and behaviour justifies the attempt of implementing emotional and social intelligence aimed at exceeding the single ability to help the user. In this paper we present an Embodied Conversa-tional Agent’s (ECA’s) architecture and methods useful to interpret the user affec-tive attitude during her dialog with an ECA and behaving 'believably' in its turn. In particular, we present an agent architecture that is general enough to be applied in several application domains and that can employ several ECA’s bodies according to the context requirements