Re-architecting the virtual human toolkit: towards an interoperable platform for embodied conversational agent research and development

The research and development (R&D) of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) is inherently complex. We aim to manage this complexity by combining the best aspects of academic and commercial approaches into a principled R&D platform that emphasizes interoperability, ex-tendability, re-use, and support for multiple hardware targets. This IVA platform, the Virtual Human Toolkit 2.0, is a re-architecture of our earlier work and combines a modular message passing architecture with that of a microservices architecture. This paper discusses our approach, design decisions, lessons learned, and current status of this ongoing effort. We illustrate the strengths of the architecture, how best to use commodity AI cloud services in one's own work, and how to port legacy stand-alone software to a web service.