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144 Socially Intelligent AgentsFigure 17.1.Carmen in Gina’s office.Gina and Carmen interact through spoken dialog. In order to add realismand maximize the expressive effect of this dialog, recorded dialog of voice actorsis used instead of speech synthesis. A significant amount of variabilityin the generated dialog is supported by breaking the recordings into meaningfulindividual phrases and fragments. Additionally variability is achieved byrecording multiple variations of the dialog (in content and emotional expression).The agents compose their dialog on the fly. The dialog is also annotatedwith its meaning, intent and emotional content. The agents use the annotationsto understand each other, to decide what to say, and more generally to interact.The agents experience the annotations in order, so their internal state andappearance can be in flux over the dialog segment.3. Agent ArchitectureThe agent architecture is depicted in Figure 17.2. There are modules forproblem solving, dialog, emotional appraisal and physical focus. The problemsolving module is the agent’s cognitive layer, specifically its goals, planningand deliberative reaction to world events. The dialog module models how touse dialog to achieve goals. Emotional appraisal is how the agent emotionallyevaluates events (e.g., the dialog annotations). Finally, physical focus managesthe agent’s nonverbal behavior.There are several novel pathways in the model worth noting. The agent’sown acts feed back as input. Thus it is possible for the agent to say somethingand then emotionally and cognitively react to the fact that it has said it.Emotional appraisal impacts problem solving, dialog and behavior. Finally,there are multiple inputs to physical focus, from emotional appraisal, dialogand problem solving, all competing for the agent’s physical resources (arms,legs, mouth, head, etc.). For instance, the dialog module derives dialog that