A Plug and Play Spoken Dialogue Interface for Smart Environments

Abstract

Esta es la versión de autor de la comunicación de congreso publicada en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: Abstract. In this paper we present a plug and play dialogue system for smart environments. The environment description and its state are stored on a domain ontology. This ontology is formed by entities that represent real world contextual information and abstract concepts. This information is complemented with linguistic parts that allow to automatically create a spoken interface for the environment. The spoken interface is based on multiple dialogues, related to every ontology entity with linguistic information. Firstly, the dialogue system creates appropriate grammars for the dialogues. Secondly, it creates the dialogue parts, employing a tree structure. Grammars support the recognition process and the dialogue tree supports the interpretation and generation processes. The system is being tested with a prototype formed by a living room. Users may interact with and modify the physical state of this living room environment by means of the spoken dialogue interface.

The role of spoken language dialogue interaction in intelligent environments

“…Using this layer, the SDS does not need to interact directly with the devices in the physical world, thus getting rid of their specific peculiarities. The communication between the entities in the middleware and the corresponding physical devices can be implemented using standard access and control mechanisms, such as EIB (European Installation Bus) [12,13] or SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) [10].…”

Where computers disappear, virtual humans appear

“…This does not mean that such devices cannot play a useful role (see e.g. [3]). But they themselves can achieve the role of a virtual personality or they can be used to display a virtual, human-like, personality on a screen to advise the user, to answer questions and to negotiate with the environment (personal assistants, mobile companions, virtual butlers).…”

Context Adaptive Interaction with an Automatically Created Spoken Interface for Intelligent Environments

“…Some of these properties are employed to create the spoken dialogue interface by means of linguistic parts. This information is composed of a verb part (the actions that can be taken with the entity), an object part (the name that it receives), a location part (where it is in the environment), etc [1].…”

“…Dialogues are automatically created and they allow to interact with the environment and control its devices by means of spoken natural language interaction. The paper focuses on the interpretation and generation processes and it just briefly explains how the system builds the plug and play dialogues for any given environment, which is thoroughly described in [1].…”