Emotion recognition and its application to computer agents with spontaneous interactive capabilities

Nonverbal information, such as the emotions, plays an essential role in human communication. Unfortunately, only the verbal aspect of communication has been focused on in communications between humans and computer agents. In the future, however, it is expected that computer agents will have nonverbal as well as verbal communication capabilities. In this paper, we first study the recognition of the emotions involved in human speech. Then we apply this emotion recognition algorithm to a computer agent that plays a character role in the interactive movie system that we are developing.