In times of crisis, an effective communication mechanism is paramount in providing accurate and timely information to the community. In this paper we study the use of an intelligent embodied conversational agent (ECA) as the front end interface with the public for a crisis communication network portal (CCNet). The proposed system, CCNet, is an integration of the intelligent conversation agent, AINI, and an automated knowledge extraction agent (AKEA). The AKEA retrieves first hand information from relevant sources such as government departments and news channels. In this paper, we compare the interaction of AINI against two popular search engines, two question answering systems and two conversational systems