Advances in artificial intelligence and in particular machine learning and neural networks have given rise to a new generation of virtual assistants and chatbots. Within this work, we present NADiA - Neurally Animated Dialog Agent - that leverages both the user’s verbal input as well as their facial expressions to respond in a meaningful way. NADiA combines a neural language model that generates appropriate responses to user prompts, a convolutional neural network for facial expression analysis, and virtual human technology that is deployed on a mobile phone. Here, we evaluate NADiA’s anthropomorphic characteristics and its ability to understand the human interlocutor using both subjective as well as objective measures. We find that NADiA significantly outperforms state of the art chatbot technology and produces comparable behavior to human generated reference outputs.