Due to a growing older population, researchers and industry are pay- ing more attention to the needs of this group of people. Ambient Intelligence (AmI) aims to help people in their daily lives, achieving a more natural inter- action of users with an electronic home environment. Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) arise as a natural interface between humans and AmI. Our con- tribution is to present AVATAR: an architecture to develop ECAs based on open source tools and libraries. In the current prototype the virtual agent acts as a nat- ural control interface of the home automation system. In addition, we provide the details to allow its use by Spanish speakers.
['Marcos Santos-Pérez', 'Eva González-Parada', 'José Manuel Cano-García']
AVATAR: An Open Source Architecture for Embodied Conversational Agents in Smart Environments