Commercial adventure games and visual novels continue to rely on scripted dialogue trees—essentially branching alternative directions in which the dialogue can be expected to turn, with ELIZA-like technology supporting the alternatives. More sophisticated approaches to interaction between users and virtual characters are under development in various research laboratories, for example at the Center for Human Modeling and Simulation at the University of Pennsylvania, and the USC-affiliated Institute for Creative Technologies. While the dialogues in these scenarios are still based on carefully designed scripts, the interpretation of the user's spoken utterances exploits an array of well-founded techniques in speech recognition, dialogue management, and reasoning. Ongoing research can be tracked at venues such as IVA (Intelligent Virtual Agents), AIIDE (AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment), and AAMAS (Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems).