We describe a conversational system for child-robot interaction built with an event-based integration approach using the Nao robot platform with the Urbi middleware within the ALIZE project. Our integrated system includes components for the recognition, interpretation and generation of speech and gestures, dialogue management and user modeling. We describe our approach to processing spoken input and output and highlight some practical implementation issues. We also present preliminary results from experiments where young Italian users interacted with the system.
Index Terms: human-robot interaction, integration, Nao, Urbi, italian children speech recognition, italian speech synthesis, voice activity detection, sound source localization, dialogue management, natural language generation, non-verbal behavior generation.