Zara: An Empathetic Interactive Virtual Agent

Zara, or ‘Zara the Supergirl’, is a virtual robot that can show empathy while interacting with an user, and at the end of a 5–10 minute conversation, it can give a personality analysis based on the user responses. It can display and share emotions with the aid of its built in sentiment analysis, facial and emotion recognition, and speech module. Being the first of its kind, it has successfully integrated an empathetic system along with the human emotion recognition and sharing, into an augmented human-robot interaction system. Zara was also displayed at the World Economic Forum held at Dalian in September 2015.