Multimodal Embodied Conversational Agents: A discussion of architectures, frameworks and modules for commercial applications

With the recent advancements in automated communication technology, many traditional businesses that rely on face-to-face communication have shifted to online portals. However, these online platforms often lack the personal touch essential for customer service. Research has shown that face-to- face communication is essential for building trust and empathy with customers. A multimodal embodied conversation agent (ECA) can fill this void in commercial applications. Such a platform provides tools to understand the user’s mental state by analyzing their verbal and non-verbal behaviour and allows a human-like avatar to take necessary action based on the context of the conversation and as per social norms. However, the literature to understand the impact of ECA agents on commercial applications is limited because of the issues related to platform and scalability. In our work, we discuss some existing work that tries to solve the issues related to scalability and infrastructure. We also provide an overview of the components required for developing ECAs and their deployment in various applications.