A Vietnamese 3D taking face for embodied conversational agents

Abstract

Conversational agents are receiving significant attention from multi-agent and human computer interaction research societies. Many techniques have been developed to enable these agents to behave in a human-like manner. In order to do so, they are simulated with similar communicative channels as humans. Moreover, they are also simulated with emotion and personality. In this work, we focus on issue of expressing emotions for embodied-agents. We present a three dimensional face with ability to speak emotional Vietnamese speech and naturally express emotions while talking. Our face can represent lip movements during emotionally pronouncing Vietnamese words, and at the same time it can show emotional facial expressions while speaking. The face's architecture consists of three parts: Vietnamese Emotional Speech Synthesis module, Emotions to Facial Expressions module, and Combination module which creates lip movements when pronouncing Vietnamese emotional speech and combines these movements with emotional facial expressions. We have tested the face in the football supporter domain in order to confirm its naturalness. The face is simulated as the face of a football supporter agent which experiences emotions and expresses emotional expressions in his voice as well as on his face.