Towards an Embodied Conversational Agent Talking in Croatian

The advancement of traffic makes world more and more internationalized and increases frequency of communication between people who come from different cultures. Differences in their conversation go beyond the languages they speak to the non-verbal behaviors they express while talking. To improve the abilities of the embodied conversational agents (ECAs) while interacting with human users we are working on the ECA based application, a tour guide of city Dubrovnik that servers visitors in Japanese, Croatian and general western cultures speaking in English. This paper presents the overall architecture and explains possible extension with another culture. It describes issues we met while making agent talk in Croatian and proposed solutions.