Kizuna: An Affective Virtual Agent for Strengthening Resilience in Children

Abstract

Kizuna is an intelligent affective virtual agent designed to support the practice of resilience-related skills in children through interactive socio-emotional activities. The system combines speech-based interaction, large language model-driven dialogue generation, contextual memory, and virtual companion characters to create engaging and personalized conversational experiences. Kizuna guides children through activities focused on emotional awareness, self-efficacy, cognitive flexibility, and emotional regulation. Its architecture integrates speech recognition, dialogue management, activity management, virtual companions, and speech synthesis components that work together to provide coherent and context-aware interactions. This demonstration presents the technical design and real-time interaction capabilities of Kizuna as a child-centered conversational system.