conversational interface Papers

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of a new breed of human computer interfaces that combines several human language technologies to enable humans to converse with computers using spoken dialogue for information access, creation, and processing. In this paper, we introduce the nature of these conversational interfaces, and describe the underlying human language technologies on which they are based. After summarizing some of the recent progress in this area around the world, we discuss... Read more

People engage in small talk and conversational storytelling to provide information in engaging ways and to serve interpersonal goals such as building rapport and credibility. Embodied conversational interface agents, that represent the computer in its interaction with human users by way of a graphical humanoid body on a screen, can also profitably engage in these behaviors. We describe the ongoing development of an embodied conversational interface agent that is capable of multimodal input understanding and... Read more

In this paper, we argue for embodied conversational characters as the logical extension of the metaphor of human – computer interaction as a conversation. We argue that the only way to fully model the richness of human face-to-face communication is to rely on conversational analysis that describes sets of conversational behaviors as fulfilling conversational functions, both interactional and propositional. We demonstrate how to implement this approach in Rea, an embodied conversational agent that is capable... Read more

The Olga project has developed an animated agent interface for information services. The interface combines a graphical interface, spoken dialogue and an animated 3D ‘human-like’ character for multimodal interaction with users. The interaction is intelligently managed using techniques derived from spoken dialogue but extended for the graphical modality. The Olga agent is innovative in combining an interactive spoken dialogue system with a 3-D animated character using lip-synchronized synthetic speech and gesturing. Particular attention has been... Read more

Computer system designers and computer users frequently utilize metaphors as organizing structures for dealing with the complexity of behavior of human/computer interfaces. This paper considers four metaphors concerning the mode of interaction between user and machine: the conversation metaphor, the declaration metphor, the model world metaphor and the collaborative manipulation metaphor. It is argued that the key to the functional properties of an interface lie in the reference relations between the expressions in the interface... Read more