Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are computer generated life-like characters that interact with human users in face-to-face conversations. To achieve natural multi-modal conversations, ECA systems are very sophisticated and require many building assemblies and thus are difficult for individual research groups to develop. This paper proposes a generic architecture, the Universal ECA Framework, which is currently under development and includes a blackboard-based platform, a high-level protocol to integrate general purpose ECA components and ease ECA system prototyping.