Interacting with Socio-emotional Agents

In this paper I present our current work toward endowing virtual agents with socio-emotional capabilities. Through its behaviors, the agent can sustain a conversation, display emotional states as well as show various attitudes and levels of engagement. I will describe methods, based on corpus analysis, crowd-sourcing or motion capture, we are using to enrich its repertoire of multimodal behaviors. These behaviors can be displayed with different qualities and intensities to simulate various communicative intentions and emotional states. We have been developing a platform of humanoid agent able to interact with humans. I will describe an interactive system of socio-emotional agent dialoging with human users.