Integrating reactive and scripted behaviors in a life-like presentation agent

Animated agents - based either on real video, cartoon-style drawings or even model-based 3D graphics - offer great promise for computer-based presentations as they make presentations more lively and appealing and allow for the emulation of conversation styles known from human-human communication. In this paper, we describe a life-like interface agent which presents multimedia material to the user following the directives of a script. The overall behavior of the presentation agent is partly determined by such a script, and partly by the agents self-behavior. In our approach, the agents behavior is defined in a declarative specification language. Behavior specifications are used to automatically generate a control module for an agent display system. The first part of the paper describes the generation process which involves AI planning and a two-step compilation. Since the manual creation of presentation scripts is tedious and error-prone, we also address the automated generation of pr...