Intelligent virtual agents require advanced dialogue techniques. This workshop identifies and describes four interrelated dialogue techniques that enable virtual agents to act intelligently. This workshop goes over dynamically adjusting the dialogue context, based on recent user input; rephrasing the agent’s responses so they don’t sound repetitive; automatically generating conversational ellipsis (wording redundant with previous parts of the conversation) in the agent’s response for naturalness and efficiency; interpreting badly formed user utterances; and integrating information expressed by the user via multiple modalities. It presents examples illustrating each of these techniques using a simple graphic “blockly” notation. Emmett Coin also illustrates how to combine these techniques to form more powerful dialogue managers, using a layered approach to a dialogue design. This layering strategy is essential to manage dialogue design and implementation complexity as agent interactions become more open. Bring your laptop for a hands-on experience. For instructions on downloading the browser-based, blockly-based editor, a dialogue engine server connection, and example code to be used in this course, visitejtalk.com/v2/pres/STU2015.html.