Welcome to Companions

COMPANIONS aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing a virtual conversational 'Companion'.

This will be an agent or 'presence' that stays with the user for long periods of time, developing a relationship and 'knowing' its owners preferences and wishes. It will communicate with the user primarily by using and understanding speech.

The project consists of a consortium of 14 partners from across Europe and the US. The European Commission is funding the project as part of its 6th Research Framework, specifically as part of its focus on Information Society Technologies.

The Companions Project website is temporarily unavailable while it undergoes a major revision. Until the revised wesite is complete, queries about the project should be directed to the Project Leader (Marc Cavazza, m.o.cavazza@tees.ac.uk) or the Project Manager (Debora Field, d.field@shef.ac.uk). Posted: 6 July 2010.

Companions News

News (May 2010): The English Companion has been awarded the Best Demo Award at AAMAS 2010. AAMAS is the premier conference for autonomous agents, including virtual agents and Embodied Conversational Agents, and draws a significant attendance of 700-800 on average.

Companions Prize Demo: Marc Cavazza (Project Leader) with (left) Jaakko Hakulinen (Tampere) and (right) Markku Turunen (PI, Tampere) with the AAMAS 2010 Best Demo Award, received for the English Companion.

News (May 2010): Companions has been selected for the Information and Communication Technologies 2010 (ICT2010) exhibition in Brussels this September 27-29th. We will be demonstrating both the English Companion and the Czech Companion.

News: There will be a one-day Workshop on Companionable Dialogue Systems at ACL 2010 (Uppsala, Sweden, 11-16 July 2010). A description, possible topics, organizers and program committee are available on the workshop site.

News: First Companions book published by Benjamins, 20 March 2010: Close Engagements with Artificial Companions.

Support

European Commission Sixth Framework Programme
Information Society Technologies Integrated Project IST-34434