Conversational AI (ConvAI) systems are gaining growing importance as an alternative for more natural interaction with digital services. In this context, Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened new possibilities for less restricted interaction and richer natural language understanding. However, despite their advanced capabilities, LLMs can pose accuracy and reliability problems, as they sometimes generate factually incorrect or contextually inappropriate content that does not fulfill the regulations or business rules of a specific application domain. In addition, they still do not possess the capability to adjust to users’ needs and preferences, showing emotional awareness, while concurrently adhering to the regulations and limitations of their designated domain. In this paper we present the TrustBoost project, which addresses the challenge of improving trustworthiness of ConvAI from two dimensions: cognition (adaptability, flexibility, compliance, and performance) and affectivity (familiarity, emotional dimension, and perception). The duration of the project is from September 2024 to December 2027.

This paper presents an adaptive model of multimodal social behavior for embodied conversational agents. The context of this research is the training of youngsters for job interviews in a serious game where the agent plays the role of a virtual recruiter. With the proposed model the agent is able to adapt its social behavior according to the anxiety level of the trainee and a predefined difficulty level of the game. This information is used to select the objective of the system (to challenge or comfort the user), which is achieved by selecting the complexity of the next question posed and the agent’s verbal and non-verbal behavior. We have carried out a perceptive study that shows that the multimodal behavior of an agent implementing our model successfully conveys the expected social attitudes.