Abstract-The properties of multimodality, individuality, adaptability, availability, cooperativeness and trustworthiness are at the focus of the investigation of Companion Systems. In this article, we describe the involved key components of such a system and the way they interact with each other. Along with the article comes a video, in which we demonstrate a fully functional prototypical implementation and explain the involved scientific contributions in a simplified manner. The realized technology considers the entire situation of the user and the environment in current and past states. The gained knowledge reflects the context of use and serves as basis for decision-making in the presented adaptive system.

Human-computer trust has shown to be a critical factor in influencing the complexity and frequency of interaction in technical systems. Particularly incomprehensible situations in human-computer interaction may lead to a reduced users trust in the system and by that influence the style of interaction. Analogous to human-human interaction, explaining these situations can help to remedy negative effects. In this paper we present our approach of augmenting task-oriented dialogs with selected explanation dialogs to foster the humancomputer trust relationship in those kinds of situations. We have conducted a webbased study testing the effects of different goals of explanations on the components of human-computer trust. Subsequently, we show how these results can be used in our probabilistic trust handling architecture to augment pre-defined task-oriented dialogs.

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Maintaining and enhancing the willingness of a user to interact with a technical system is crucial for human-computer interaction (HCI). Trust has shown to be an important factor influencing the frequency and kind of usage. In this paper we present our work on using explanations to maintain the trust relationship between human and computer. We conducted an experiment on how different goals of explanations influence the bases of human-computer trust. We present the results of the conducted study and outline what this means for the design of future technical systems and in particular for the central dialogue management component controlling the course and content of the HCI.

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