This demonstration paper presents a bilingual (Arabic-English) interactive human avatar dialogue system. The system is named TOIA (time-offset interaction application), as it simulates face-to-face conversations between humans using digital human avatars recorded in the past. TOIA is a conversational agent, similar to a chat bot, except that it is based on an actual human being and can be used to preserve and tell stories. The system is designed to allow anybody, simply using a laptop, to create an avatar of themselves, thus facilitating cross-cultural and cross-generational sharing of narratives to wider audiences. The system currently supports monolingual and cross-lingual dialogues in Arabic and English, but can be extended to other languages.

This paper presents BOTTA, the first Arabic dialect chatbot. We explore the challenges of creating a conversational agent that aims to simulate friendly conversations using the Egyptian Arabic dialect. We present a number of solutions and describe the different components of the BOTTA chatbot. The BOTTA database files are publicly available for researchers working on Arabic chatbot technologies. The BOTTA chatbot is also publicly available for any users who want to chat with it online.