According to Roble, the team first and foremost envisions Douglas as a visual way of interacting with existing complex and powerful conversational agents that have been created. Beneath Douglas’ photo-real avatar, the studio’s digital human is built on a blend of three of those agents: Google’s popular Dialogflow suite for creating chatbots, an assistant-type agent (similar to Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri); and a powerful conversational A.I. agent (similar to the GPT-3 project) used to produce humanlike, predictive (and reactive) conversational text.
The combination of all three agents gives Douglas the ability to carry on conversations that are both informative and fluid, with discussion of one topic often segueing into related areas of interest.