Towards Designing Enthusiastic AI Agents

Immersive virtual worlds are increasingly being used for education, training, and entertainment, and virtual humans that can interact with human users in these worlds play many important roles. Understating the emotional constructs of the user and generating multimodal forms of communications that are aligned with the user's needs and input is key to designing AI agents. Most virtual agents and communicative systems lack the ability to understand enthusiasm or generate multimodal enthusiastic communicative presentations. In this work, we argue for the importance of including enthusiasm in the design of human-AI collaboration and communication and review the existing datasets and models that can be used to bridge the gap in this area.