A Visual Counseling Agent Avatar with Voice Conversation and Fuzzy Response

There are many IT workers, who suffer distress in their work. On the other hand, there are only a few counselors for providing mutual help. For this reason, we developed a counseling agent (CA) called Virtual Counseling Agent (VCA). This agent detects emotional words in the clients' utterances. In particular, it realizes the emotional changes and provides short summaries, that shows the client these changes. This paper introduces a further step to make the CA more humanoid by an image avatar with voice conversation using Google cloud speech API for high quality speech recognition. Moreover, the CA responses are derived by fuzzy reasoning with soft differences according to the fuzzy rules instead of random choices or sharp logic. This way, the responses became more human-like. The evaluation showed the effect of the new VCA.