Dialog in the open world

Dan Bohus, Eric Horvitz
2009 Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on Multimodal interfaces - ICMI-MLMI '09  
We review key challenges of developing spoken dialog systems that can engage in interactions with one or multiple participants in relatively unconstrained environments. We outline a set of core competencies for open-world dialog, and describe three prototype systems. The systems are built on a common underlying conversational framework which integrates an array of predictive models and component technologies, including speech recognition, head and pose tracking, probabilistic models for scene
more » ... alysis, multiparty engagement and turn taking, and inferences about user goals and activities. We discuss the current models and showcase their function by means of a sample recorded interaction, and we review results from an observational study of open-world, multiparty dialog in the wild. relationships and pathways, objects, topologies, and communication affordances. Like the multi-participant aspect, the often implicit, yet powerful physicality of situated interaction, provides opportunities for making ongoing inferences in openworld dialog systems, and challenges system designers to innovate across a spectrum of complexity and sophistication.
doi:10.1145/1647314.1647323 dblp:conf/icmi/BohusH09 fatcat:fb34jadrjrdi5frv5nuzjsp3fy