Talking Agents: A distributed architecture for interactive artistic installations

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Fernández, José M. | Pavón, Juan^{; *}

Affiliations: Department Ingeniería del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Dr. Juan Pavón, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Informática, 28040 Madrid, Spain. E-mail: jpavon@fdi.ucm.es.

Abstract: Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence imply challenges and opportunities to explore new kinds of artistic experiences in interaction with the spectator of an artistic installation. In this context, a wide range of elements, such as sensors and speech recognition and synthesis, has been considered to establish an intelligent environment with an artistic purpose. The coordination of these elements to create an interactive environment where the spectator may feel faced with some kind of human-like behavior (the use of speech contributes to this goal) requires the integration of different Artificial Intelligence techniques. The definition of Talking Agents as reusable components for managing coordination of this diversity of elements and the interaction with the spectator facilitates building and setting different artistic scenarios. This paper describes the architecture of Talking Agents and their implementation in a multi-agent framework. This has been used in an experiment with an artistic installation called ORACULOS, and the results have been the basis for considering the evolution and application of the Talking Agent architecture in Ambient Assisted Living scenarios.

Keywords: Talking Agent, ambient assisted living, agent architecture

DOI: 10.3233/ICA-2010-0341

Journal: Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 243-259, 2010