  Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) benefit from non-verbal behavior for
natural and efficient interaction with users. Gesticulation - hand and arm
movements accompanying speech - is an essential part of non-verbal behavior.
Gesture generation models have been developed for several decades: starting
with rule-based and ending with mainly data-driven methods. To date, recent
end-to-end gesture generation methods have not been evaluated in a real-time
interaction with users. We present a proof-of-concept framework, which is
intended to facilitate evaluation of modern gesture generation models in
interaction.
  We demonstrate an extensible open-source framework that contains three
components: 1) a 3D interactive agent; 2) a chatbot backend; 3) a gesticulating
system. Each component can be replaced, making the proposed framework
applicable for investigating the effect of different gesturing models in
real-time interactions with different communication modalities, chatbot
backends, or different agent appearances. The code and video are available at
the project page https://nagyrajmund.github.io/project/gesturebot.
