Clark Elliott
Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence
School of Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Information Systems
DePaul University,
243 South Wabash Ave., Chicago, IL 60604
email: elliott@ils.nwu.edu, Web: http://condor.depaul.edu/elliott
In our research we make use of ``emotionally intelligent'' agents as part of a collection of AI programs we refer to as the Affective Reasoner. These agents are able to interact with subjects using a multimodal approach which includes speech recognition, text-to-speech, real-time morphed schematic faces, and music. In a recent study we hoped to show that users could gather enough information from the agents' different communication modalities to correctly assign intended (social, emotional) meanings to ambiguous sentences, and specifically that this ability would compare favorably with a human actor's ability to convey such meanings.
In fact, subjects did significantly better at correctly matching videotapes of computer-generated presentations with the intended emotion scenarios (70%) than they did with videotapes of a human actor attempting to convey the same scenarios