CHAT: a conversational helper for automotive tasks

Weng, Fuliang; Varges, Sebastian; Raghunathan, Badri; Ratiu, Florin; Pon-Barry, Heather; Lathrop, Brian; Zhang, Qi; Bratt, Harry; Scheideck, Tobias; Xu, Kui; Purver, Matthew; Mishra, Rohit; Lien, Annie; Raya, M.; Peters, S.; Meng, Y.; Russell, J.; Cavedon, Lawrence; Shriberg, Elizabeth; Schmidt, H.; Prieto, R.

doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2006-159

CHAT: a conversational helper for automotive tasks

Fuliang Weng, Sebastian Varges, Badri Raghunathan, Florin Ratiu, Heather Pon-Barry, Brian Lathrop, Qi Zhang, Harry Bratt, Tobias Scheideck, Kui Xu, Matthew Purver, Rohit Mishra, Annie Lien, M. Raya, S. Peters, Y. Meng, J. Russell, Lawrence Cavedon, Elizabeth Shriberg, H. Schmidt, R. Prieto

Spoken dialogue interfaces, mostly command-and-control, become more visible in applications where attention needs to be shared with other tasks, such as driving a car. The deployment of the simple dialog systems, instead of more sophisticated ones, is partly because the computing platforms used for such tasks have been less powerful and partly because certain issues from these cognitively challenging tasks have not been well addressed even in the most advanced dialog systems. This paper reports the progress of our research effort in developing a robust, wide-coverage, and cognitive load-sensitive spoken dialog interface called CHAT: Conversational Helper for Automotive Tasks. Our research in the past few years has led to promising results, including high task completion rate, dialog efficiency, and improved user experience.