Social interaction: multimodal conversation with social agents

Abstract

Abstract including robotics, artificial life, and artificial ecosys-tems. We present a new approach to human-computer interaction, called so&Z interaction. Its main characteristics are summarized by the follow-ing three points. First, interactions are real-ized as multimodal (verbal and nonverbal) con-versation using spoken language, facial expres-sions, and so on. Second, the conversants are a group of humans and social agents that are au-tonomous and social. Autonomy is an impor-tant property that allows agents to decide how to act in an ever-changing environment. So-cialness is also an important property that al-lows agents to behave both cooperatively and col-