Design Of A Knowledge-Based Agent As A Social Companion

We present work in progress on an intelligent embodied conversation agent that is supposed to act as a social companion with linguistic and emotional competence in the context of basic and health care. The core of the agent is an ontology-based knowledge model that supports flexible reasoning-driven conversation planning strategies. A dedicated search engine ensures the provision of background information from the web, necessary for conducting a conversation on a specific topic. Multimodal communication analysis and generation modules analyze respectively generate facial expressions, gestures and multilingual speech. The assessment of the prototypical implementation of the agent shows that users accept it as a natural and trustworthy conversation counterpart. For the fmal release, all involved technologies will be further improved and matured. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.