How to Win Arguments: Empowering Virtual Agents to Improve Their Persuasiveness

People make decisions every day or form an opinion based on persuasion processes, whether through advertising, planning leisure activities with friends or public speeches. Most of the time, however, subliminal persuasion processes triggered by behavioral cues (rather than the content of the message) play a far more important role than most people are aware of. To raise awareness of the different aspects of persuasion (how and what), we present a multimodal dialog system consisting of two virtual agents that use synthetic speech in a discussion setting to present pros and cons to a user on a controversial topic. The agents are able to adapt their emotions based on explicit feedback of the users to increase their perceived persuasiveness during interaction using Reinforcement Learning.