Implementing Virtual Agent as an Interface for Smart Home Voice Control

We have been developing a hands-free voice controller for a home network system (HNS) by using microphone arrays. In our current implementation, however, all human-HNS interactions are performed by voice only. Hence, the interactions tend to be mechanical, dreary and uninformative. To achieve richer interactions, we try to introduce the virtual agent technology as a feedback interface of the HNS. In this paper, we implement the virtual agent as a Web service, by using MMDAgent Toolkit extensively. The agent is then integrated with the HNS and microphone arrays in a service-oriented fashion. Finally, we conduct a user experiment with three versions of virtual agents. In the experiment, we evaluate how the virtual agent can enrich the interactions.