COMPANIONS is a 4-year, EU funded Framework Programme 6 project, involving a consortium of 16 partners across 8 countries. It’s aim is to develop a personalized conversational interface, one that knows and understands its owner, and can act as an alternative access point to resources on the Internet, all the while nurturing an emotional involvement from it’s owner/user to invoke the shift from interaction to relationship. On a technical level it intends to push the state of the art in machine based natural language understanding, knowledge structures, speech recognition and text to speech. With these technical developments will come advanced interaction design elements.

 

COMPANIONS will learn about their owners: their habits, their needs and their life memories. This will allow them to assist with carrying out specific Internet tasks, which will be facilitated by having complex models of their owners, by which we mean whole-life-memories, or coherent autobiographies, built from texts, conversations, images and videos. Some of this will already be in digital form, but some will be information gleaned from conversations with the COMPANION.

 

COMPANIONS will be autonomous and have original aspects of persistent human personality to establish loyalty and trust between users and such agents. They will be sensitive to limited emotion in speech and to the content of images, and will be themselves capable of demonstrating emotional/affective behavior through speech and visual appearance (e.g. an avatar on a PC screen or mobile phone). COMPANIONS will also, by communicating with each other enable and enhance communication between the human users, rather than only between humans and these machine artifacts.