Children's and adults' multimodal interaction with 2D conversational agents

Few systems combine both Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) and multimodal input. This research aims at modeling the behavior of adults and children during their multimodal interaction with ECAs. A Wizard-of-Oz setup was used and users were video-recorded while interacting with 2D ECAs in a game scenario with speech and pen as input modes. We found that frequent social cues and natural Human-Human syntax condition the verbal interaction of both groups with ECAs. Multimodality accounted for 21% of inputs: it was used for integrating conversational and social aspects (by speech) into task-oriented actions (by pen). We closely examined temporal and semantic integration of modalities: most of the time, speech and gesture overlapped and produced complementary or redundant messages; children also tended to produce concurrent multimodal inputs, as a way of doing several things at the same time. Design implications of our results for multimodal bidirectional ECAs and game systems are discussed.