Optimizing SIA Development: A Case Study in User-Centered Design for Estuary, a Multimodal Socially Interactive Agent Framework
This work aims to guide the development of SIA frameworks for researchers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods like RAP.
The paper tackles the problem of developing Socially Intelligent Agent (SIA) frameworks by presenting a user-centered design model based on the Estuary framework, using the Rapid Assessment Process (RAP) to gather insights from leading researchers to address current research gaps.
This case study presents our user-centered design model for Socially Intelligent Agent (SIA) development frameworks through our experience developing Estuary, an open source multimodal framework for building low-latency real-time socially interactive agents. We leverage the Rapid Assessment Process (RAP) to collect the thoughts of leading researchers in the field of SIAs regarding the current state of the art for SIA development as well as their evaluation of how well Estuary may potentially address current research gaps. We achieve this through a series of end-user interviews conducted by a fellow researcher in the community. We hope that the findings of our work will not only assist the continued development of Estuary but also guide the development of other future frameworks and technologies for SIAs.