Multimodal and Mobile Conversational Health and Fitness Companions

Markku Turunen (1) , Jaakko Hakulinen (1) , Olov Ståhl , Björn Gambäck (2) , Preben Hansen , Mari C. Rodríguez Gancedo , Raúl Santos de La Cámara , Cameron Smith (3) , Daniel Charlton (3) , Marc Cavazza (3)

1 Department of Computer Sciences
2 Department of Computer and Information Science
3 University of Teesside

Multimodal conversational spoken dialogues using physical and virtual agents provide a potential interface to motivate and support users in the domain of health and _tness. In this paper we present how such multimodal conversational Companions can be implemented to support their owners in various pervasive and mobile settings. We present concrete system architectures, virtual, physical and mobile multimodal interfaces, and interaction management techniques for such companions. In particular, we present how knowledge representation and separation of low-level interaction modelling from high-level reasoning at the domain level makes it possible to implement distributed, but still coherent, interaction with Companions. The distribution is enabled by using a dialogue plan to communicate information from domain level planner to dialogue management and from there to a separate mobile interface. The model enables each part of the system to handle the same information from its own perspective without containing overlapping logic, and makes it possible to separate task-specific and conversational dialogue management from each other. In addition to technical descriptions, we present results from the _rst evaluations of the Companions interfaces.

Mots clés: Companions; Embodied Conversational Agents; Conversational Spoken Dialogue systems; Mobile interfaces; Cognitive; Modelling; Dialogue management

Domaines: Linguistique

Markku Turunen, Jaakko Hakulinen, Olov Ståhl, Björn Gambäck, Preben Hansen, et al.. Multimodal and Mobile Conversational Health and Fitness Companions. Computer Speech and Language, 2010, 25 (2), pp.192. ⟨10.1016/j.csl.2010.04.004⟩. ⟨hal-00692186⟩