On January 2016 the ARIA-VALUSPA team presented their integrated system to a camera crew which captured the first interactions with the avatar (based on the story “Alice in Wonderland”).
This first Milestone will be followed by a next public version at the end of this year.

In the Top 10 strategic technology trends for 2016 and after, Gartner identified artificial intelligence and digital assistants as key to developing digital business opportunities. The market of Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVA) is growing considerably. Having simple tools to create IVAs is a priority for companies that want to have a dedicated virtual assistant that they can easily modify and maintain independently. A leading-edge platform that automates the process of IVA creation, improvement, and sustainment has been developed by Aria-Valuspa’s partner Living Actor™.
Within the Aria-Valuspa project, Living Actor™ explores the contribution of emotions in human – machine interactions, focusing on animated avatars. More information can be found here.

The ARIA – VALUSPA team participated on the eNTERFACE ‘ 16 at Twente, Netherlands. Dr. J. Wagner presented a tutorial on Aria’s underlying Social Signal Interpretation Framework SSI: “Working with the Social Signals Interpretation (SSI) framework”. More information about the SSI framework can be found here.

A reporter from the WDR (West German Broadcasting Cologne) visited the Lab for Human-Centered Multimedia at Augsburg University, and Johannes Wagner presented the Alice agent to him. Alice does not just answer the user’s questions about “Alice in Wonderland”, but also responds to his or her emotions by analyzing voice and facial expressions. The synchronization of the multimodal signals is done by the award-winning SSI system developed by Augsburg University (www.openssi.net).