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Voice assistants are increasingly prevalent, from personal devices to team environments. This study explores how voice type and contribution quality influence human-agent team performance and perceptions of anthropomorphism, animacy,…
Vast improvements in natural language understanding and speech recognition have paved the way for conversational interaction with computers. While conversational agents have often been used for short goal-oriented dialog, we know little…
Voice assistant applications have become omniscient nowadays. Two models that provide the two most important functions for real-life applications (i.e., Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Siri, etc.) are Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models…
To cooperate with humans effectively, virtual agents need to be able to understand and execute language instructions. A typical setup to achieve this is with a scripted teacher which guides a virtual agent using language instructions.…
Search engines enable the retrieval of unknown information with texts. However, traditional methods fall short when it comes to understanding unfamiliar visual content, such as identifying an object that the model has never seen before.…
Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) owing to recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), are becoming increasingly intuitive and functional. They are especially promising for older adults, also with…
Information seeking conversations between users and Conversational Search Agents (CSAs) consist of multiple turns of interaction. While users initiate a search session, ideally a CSA should sometimes take the lead in the conversation by…
The rise of increasingly more powerful chatbots offers a new way to collect information through conversational surveys, where a chatbot asks open-ended questions, interprets a user's free-text responses, and probes answers whenever needed.…
What drives exploration? Understanding intrinsic motivation is a long-standing challenge in both cognitive science and artificial intelligence; numerous objectives have been proposed and used to train agents, yet there remains a gap between…
As data-driven methods, artificial intelligence (AI), and automated workflows accelerate scientific tasks, we see the rate of discovery increasingly limited by human decision-making tasks such as setting objectives, generating hypotheses,…
Systems powered by artificial intelligence are being developed to be more user-friendly by communicating with users in a progressively human-like conversational way. Chatbots, also known as dialogue systems, interactive conversational…
In many real-world scenarios where extrinsic rewards to the agent are extremely sparse, curiosity has emerged as a useful concept providing intrinsic rewards that enable the agent to explore its environment and acquire information to…
The development of embodied agents that can communicate with humans in natural language has gained increasing interest over the last years, as it facilitates the diffusion of robotic platforms in human-populated environments. As a step…
Assistive technologies for adults with Down syndrome (DS) need designs tailored to their specific technology requirements. While prior research has explored technology design for individuals with intellectual disabilities, little is…
Augmented Reality (AR) enriches a user's real environment by adding spatially aligned virtual objects (3D models, 2D textures, textual annotations, etc) by means of special display technologies. These are either worn on the body or placed…
Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are software agents that can perform tasks on behalf of individuals and assist them on many of their daily activities. IPAs capabilities are expanding rapidly due to the recent advances on areas such…
We describe the design of a voice trigger detection system for smart speakers. In this study, we address two major challenges. The first is that the detectors are deployed in complex acoustic environments with external noise and loud…
As augmented reality (AR) becomes increasingly prevalent in mobile and context-aware applications, the role of auditory cues in guiding users through physical environments is becoming critical. This study investigates the effectiveness and…
Interview chatbots engage users in a text-based conversation to draw out their views and opinions. It is, however, challenging to build effective interview chatbots that can handle user free-text responses to open-ended questions and…
Navigational challenges significantly impact the independence and mobility of Individuals with Visual Impairment (IVI). While numerous assistive technologies exist, their adoption remains limited due to usability challenges, financial…