I Probe, Therefore I Am: Designing a Virtual Journalist with Human Emotions
This work addresses the challenge of creating emotionally engaging virtual humans for applications like journalism, but it is incremental as it builds on existing technologies and identifies limitations rather than achieving a breakthrough.
The authors developed a Virtual Human Journalist to demonstrate the viability of novel solutions in natural language processing, computer vision, and speech synthesis for creating a humanoid conversational agent that elicits and reacts to information from users. Evaluation sessions showed technical feasibility but deficits in natural and emotionally engaging interactions, leading to an argument that suppressing naturalness, such as by altering personality cues, might be more desirable in some cases.
By utilizing different communication channels, such as verbal language, gestures or facial expressions, virtually embodied interactive humans hold a unique potential to bridge the gap between human-computer interaction and actual interhuman communication. The use of virtual humans is consequently becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of areas where such a natural communication might be beneficial, including entertainment, education, mental health research and beyond. Behind this development lies a series of technological advances in a multitude of disciplines, most notably natural language processing, computer vision, and speech synthesis. In this paper we discuss a Virtual Human Journalist, a project employing a number of novel solutions from these disciplines with the goal to demonstrate their viability by producing a humanoid conversational agent capable of naturally eliciting and reacting to information from a human user. A set of qualitative and quantitative evaluation sessions demonstrated the technical feasibility of the system whilst uncovering a number of deficits in its capacity to engage users in a way that would be perceived as natural and emotionally engaging. We argue that naturalness should not always be seen as a desirable goal and suggest that deliberately suppressing the naturalness of virtual human interactions, such as by altering its personality cues, might in some cases yield more desirable results.