Engagement with Artificial Intelligence through Natural Interaction Models

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems become more ubiquitous, what user experience design paradigms will be used by humans to impart their needs and intents to an AI system, in order to engage in a more social interaction? In our work, we look mainly at expression and creativity based systems, where the AI both attempts to model or understand/assist in processes of human expression and creativity. We therefore have designed and implemented a prototype system with more natural interaction modes for engagement with AI as well as other human computer interaction (HCI) where a more open natural communication stream is beneficial. Our proposed conversational agent system makes use of the affective signals from the gestural behaviour of the user and the semantic information from the speech input in order to generate a personalised, human-like conversation that is expressed in the visual and conversational output of the 3D virtual avatar system. We describe our system and two application spaces we are using it in - a care advisor / assistant for the elderly and an interactive creative assistant for uses to produce art forms.