Talking Eye: autonomous creature as accomplice for human

The most conventional approach to a speech based interface has been to achieve an explicit goal as a result of spoken dialogue. On the other hand spoken dialogue has also another aspect: the simple enjoyment of making conversation with participants, a typical example being casual chatting. This aspect offers a key for creating a new style of autonomous agent, which appears not as a human assistant but as a human accomplice or conversational partner. We present an autonomous creature called Talking Eyes, which has the advantage of a property of chatting. We performed a preliminary examination using subjects to illustrate the effectiveness of the interaction with Talking Eyes. The results suggested that they could enjoy the interaction with Talking Eyes even if they could not accomplish their purpose. The main goal of this work is to build autonomous creatures with a mechanism to promote a more consensual feeling through its interaction with humans.