 Companionable dialogue agents (also called relational agents) have so far relied rather heavily on chatbot techniques, i.e., authored input patterns and corresponding outputs. But the goal is to transcend these techniques, creating agents (often with talking heads or other animated characters) with personality traits and capable of showing emotion and empathy; they should have semantic and episodic memory, learning about the user over the long term and providing services to the user. Those services might include, besides companionship and support: advice in some areas of life, health and fitness, schedule maintenance, reminders, question answering, tutoring (e.g., in languages), game playing, and internet services. Yorick Wilks has suggested that ideally such characters would resemble “Victorian companions”, with such characteristics as politeness, discretion, modesty, cheerfulness, and well-informedness (Wilks 2010).