Embodied conversational agents (ECA) and speech-based human machine interfaces can together represent more advanced and more natural human machine interaction. Fusion of both topics is a challenging agenda in research and production spheres. The important goal of human machine interfaces is to provide content or functionality in the form of a dialog resembling face-to-face conversations. All natural interfaces strive to exploit and use different communication strategies that provide additional meaning to the content, whether they are human machine interfaces for controlling an application...