  Spoken dialogue systems that assist users to solve complex tasks such as
movie ticket booking have become an emerging research topic in artificial
intelligence and natural language processing areas. With a well-designed
dialogue system as an intelligent personal assistant, people can accomplish
certain tasks more easily via natural language interactions. Today there are
several virtual intelligent assistants in the market; however, most systems
only focus on textual or vocal interaction. In this paper, we present HUMBO, a
system aiming at generating dialogue responses and simultaneously synthesize
corresponding visual expressions on faces for better multimodal interaction.
HUMBO can (1) let users determine the appearances of virtual assistants by a
single image, and (2) generate coherent emotional utterances and facial
expressions on the user-provided image. This is not only a brand new research
direction but more importantly, an ultimate step toward more human-like virtual
assistants.
