Alice: A General-Purpose Virtual Assistant Framework

In this paper, a virtual assistant framework called Alice is presented. This virtual assistant is a combination of 3D avatar, face detection, face recognition and face expression recognition with a voice assistant that similar to Amazon’s Alexa. The 3D avatar (Alice) is a female character animated using Unity and the lip is animated to sync with the speech to make it looks like speaking. Besides that, the 3D avatar can display different facial expressions such as happy, sad and upset. Face detection and recognition makes the system aware of the human user’s identity. Whereas, face expression recognition enables the system to detect the facial expression of the human user. Whenever there is a question being asked, the system will use Speech-to-Text system to convert human speech to text and Natural Language Processing to interpret the intent behind the text. Based on the result of interpretation, the system decides which audio file to be used as response. Then, a realistic artificial voice is generated as response to the human user. The system can access database based on user’s identity to retrieve information about that user. This may create a personalized experience for the human user. This framework can be customized for other applications for different fields. For this Alice framework, two applications have been developed namely a question answering chatbot and a customer service agent.