Aria Valuspa

Artificial Retrieval of Information Assistants – Virtual Agents with Linguistic Understanding, Social skills, and Personalised Aspects

Gartner identifies digital assistants as key to developing digital business opportunities

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.

ARIA – VALUSPA on WDR

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).