Related papers: Is spoken language all-or-nothing? Implications fo…
Speech recognition systems are a key intermediary in voice-driven human-computer interaction. Although speech recognition works well for pristine monologic audio, real-life use cases in open-ended interactive settings still present many…
When encountering a robot in the wild, it is not inherently clear to human users what the robot's capabilities are. When encountering misunderstandings or problems in spoken interaction, robots often just apologize and move on, without…
The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has rendered the boundary between humanity and computational machinery increasingly ambiguous. In the presence of more interwoven relationships within human-machine symbiosis, the very notion of…
Computers have a direct impact on our lives nowadays. Human's interaction with the computer has modified with the passage of time as improvement in technology occurred the better the human computer interaction became. Today we are…
Current speech translation systems, while having achieved impressive accuracies, are rather static in their behavior and do not adapt to real-world situations in ways human interpreters do. In order to improve their practical usefulness and…
Technology companies have produced varied responses to concerns about the effects of the design of their conversational AI systems. Some have claimed that their voice assistants are in fact not gendered or human-like -- despite design…
Animated avatars, which look and talk like humans, are iconic visions of the future of AI-powered systems. Through many sci-fi movies we are acquainted with the idea of speaking to such virtual personalities as if they were humans. Today,…
We synthesize the reported results and recommendations of recent workshops and seminars that convened to discuss open questions within the important intersection of robotics, human-robot interaction, and spoken dialogue systems research.…
The ability of a machine to communicate with humans has long been associated with the general success of AI. This dates back to Alan Turing's epoch-making work in the early 1950s, which proposes that a machine's intelligence can be tested…
Computers have a direct impact on our lives nowadays. Human's interaction with the computer has modified with the passage of time as improvement in technology occurred the better the human computer interaction became. Today we are…
Non-Display Smart Glasses hold the potential to support everyday activities by combining continuous environmental sensing with voice-only interaction powered by large language models (LLMs). Understanding how conversational successes and…
The development of sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) conversational agents based on large language models raises important questions about the relationship between human norms, values, and practices and AI design and performance.…
Large-language models (LLMs) hold significant promise in improving human-robot interaction, offering advanced conversational skills and versatility in managing diverse, open-ended user requests in various tasks and domains. Despite the…
Modern conversational agents such as Alexa and Google Assistant represent significant progress in speech recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis. But as these agents have grown more realistic, concerns have been…
Recent years have seen an increasing number of applications that have a natural language interface, either in the form of chatbots or via personal assistants such as Alexa (Amazon), Google Assistant, Siri (Apple), and Cortana (Microsoft).…
In this talk, I argue that there are certain pragmatic features of natural language (that I will call 'productivity' and 'malleability', on top of syntactical generativity and semantical compositionality), which are not only hard, but even…
Automated Speech Recognition shows superhuman performance for adult English speech on a range of benchmarks, but disappoints when fed children's speech. This has long sat in the way of child-robot interaction. Recent evolutions in…
It is well-known that speakers who entrain to one another have more successful conversations than those who do not. Previous research has shown that interlocutors entrain on linguistic features in both written and spoken monolingual…
Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…
A few decades of work in the AI field have focused efforts on developing a new generation of systems which can acquire knowledge via interaction with the world. Yet, until very recently, most such attempts were underpinned by research which…