ARIA-VALUSPA is an international project aiming to create advanced virtual agents – ARIAs (Affective Retrieval of Information Assistants) - that are able to engage in realistic and humanlike dialogues with their users.
Virtual writers
The project started in January 2015 and is scheduled to last three years. The first demo application should be developed within the first two years.
‘The first application we will develop is a virtual writer,’ says Professor Dirk Heylen, the project’s coordinator for the UT. ‘We will recreate a famous literary author based on their books and biographies.’
‘Users will then be able to have conversations with these virtual writers, who will talk as a real person. To make the characters realistic, we cooperate with companies that specialize in creating virtual agents and voices.’
‘At this moment, we are thinking about recreating writers like Gustav Flaubert, Charles Dickens or Jane Austen. I believe this is a fun and interesting use of technology that will lead to big advances in artificial intelligence.’
Read more about the project in the May issue of UT Nieuws Magazine
