64 elements to model full body conversations between humans and agents

[Erwin Van Lun]

How to model natural full body conversations (not only NLP) between
humans and chatbots, agents and humanoids? What elements are important
from the very first moment a conversation seems to start until a real
almost intimate relationship has been built (or is it time to say
goodbye)?

At Chatbots.org, we’re extremely interested in these elements as we’re
trying to structure current and future parts of the website based on
those elements. Therefore we've worked quite extensively to find a
proper structure. Please click http://www.chatbots.org/conversational/agent/categorisation/
to discover the 64 elements we've found or read the summary below. We
have defined the following 9 'stages':

1. Identity: The agent’s identity. The ‘who’. Not based on any
conversation, what is its behaviour, its personality, its knowledge,
its social background like, and which sensors does this agent have to
sense its environment?
2. Identification: How can an agent distinguish a human being
from other living (and non-living) entities by observing its sensors
and how can an agent identify them: does the agent already know this
person?
3. Perception: Is something different than the last time the
human being and virtual agent communicated? What does the body posture
and facial geography say? Would the agent already be capable to say
something about its conversational partner, the human being, without
any communication, just by observing? The filtering process, which
information is relevant, is extremely important in this phase.
4. Processing: During this phase, the communication has been
started and the agent is processing the verbal and non-verbal input
from the human, creates associations and intentional behavior.
5. Expression: At this stage the agents knows what to express,
and choses from ther the thousand ways to express it. Using gestures?
Body posture? Words? Intonation. It’s all part of this phase.
Actually, this is the last phase of the communication loop as it’s now
time for the human being to respond.
6. Appearance: Where and in what form do the agents appear? On
screens? As holographic projections? Augmented reality? Embedded in
humanoids?
7. Skills: Independent of its communication skills: what can
this agent do for human beings? Is he a good coach? A trainer? A role
player/actor? A friend? A translator?
8. Societal impact: An interesting category with discussions on
the impact of embedding of conversational AI in our society.
Sociological, psychological and philosophical.
9. Integrate: How to integrate all those concepts into a working
environment that feels natural and normal to human beings?

Curious what you think! Let us know below or via:
http://www.chatbots.org/conversational/agent/categorisation/

Erwin Van Lun