INTERACTIVE AGENTS FOR USER ENGAGEMENT IN AN INTERACTIVE ENVIRONMENT

Various aspects of the subject technology relate to systems, methods, and machine-readable media for interactive computer-operated agents for user engagement in an interactive environment. Computer-operated agents are introduced to help populate a session and are configured to maximize engagement rates among users associated with user-controlled agents. During these interactions, engagement metrics are collected that indicate different interaction rates at different times by the computer-operated agents. The number of popular computer-operated agents (with relatively high interaction rates) can be kept in circulation while some less popular computer-operated agents (with relatively smaller interaction rates) can be kept in circulation for diversity or are purged from circulation. In the disclosed system, for each instance that a user-controlled agent interacts with a computer-operated agent, a log of behavior data from that interaction can be monitored and collected to generate and/or adjust behavior models that provide the behavioral response distribution for a given computer-operated agent.