Related papers: Building Proactive Voice Assistants: When and How …
This article presents a multimodal emotion recognition module integrated into a proactive Socially Interactive Agent (SIA) powered by generative artificial intelligence. The system evaluates real-time affective states through two distinct…
Voice has become an increasingly popular User Interaction (UI) channel, mainly contributing to the ongoing trend of wearables, smart vehicles, and home automation systems. Voice assistants such as Siri, Google Now and Cortana, have become…
Using online information discovery as a case study, in this position paper we discuss the need to design, develop, and deploy (conversational) agents that can -- non-intrusively -- guide children in their quest for online resources rather…
This work presents an overarching perspective on the role that machine intelligence can play in enhancing human abilities, especially those that have been diminished due to injury or illness. As a primary contribution, we develop the…
Proactivity in robot assistance refers to the robot's ability to anticipate user needs and perform assistive actions without explicit requests. This requires understanding user routines, predicting consistent activities, and actively…
Many modern online services feature personalized recommendations. A central challenge when providing such recommendations is that the reason why an individual user accesses the service may change from visit to visit or even during an…
Current conversational AI systems aim to understand a set of pre-designed requests and execute related actions, which limits them to evolve naturally and adapt based on human interactions. Motivated by how children learn their first…
The development of conversational AI assistants is an iterative process with multiple components. As such, the evaluation and continual improvement of these assistants is a complex and multifaceted problem. This paper introduces the…
Conversational agents have traditionally been developed for either task-oriented dialogue (TOD) or open-ended chitchat, with limited progress in unifying the two. Yet, real-world conversations naturally involve fluid transitions between…
Conversational agents, such as ChatGPT and Doubao, have become essential daily assistants for billions of users. To further enhance engagement, these systems are evolving from passive responders to proactive companions. However, existing…
Conversational systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, show exceptional proficiency in context understanding and response generation. However, despite their impressive capabilities, they still possess limitations,…
The Programmer's Assistant is an experimental prototype software development environment that integrates a chatbot with a code editor. Conversational capability was achieved by using an existing code-fluent Large Language Model and…
Deep-agent communities developing their own language-like communication protocol are a hot (or at least warm) topic in AI. Such agents could be very useful in machine-machine and human-machine interaction scenarios long before they have…
Robotic process automation (RPA) has emerged as the leading approach to automate tasks in business processes. Moving away from back-end automation, RPA automated the mouse-click on user interfaces; this outside-in approach reduced the…
Advances in voice technology and voice user interfaces (VUIs) -- such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Home -- have opened up the potential for many new types of interaction. However, despite the potential of these devices reflected by the…
Recently, large language models have facilitated the emergence of highly intelligent conversational AI capable of engaging in human-like dialogues. However, a notable distinction lies in the fact that these AI models predominantly generate…
Business process automation is a booming multi-billion-dollar industry that promises to remove menial tasks from workers' plates -- through the introduction of autonomous agents -- and free up their time and brain power for more creative…
Humans vary their expressivity when speaking for extended periods to maintain engagement with their listener. Although social robots tend to be deployed with ``expressive'' joyful voices, they lack this long-term variation found in human…
Technologies increasingly mimic human-like social behaviours. Beyond prototypical conversational agents like chatbots, this also applies to basic automated systems like app notifications or self-checkout machines that address or 'talk to'…
Displaying a written transcript of what a human said (i.e. producing an "automatic speech recognition transcript") is a common feature for smartphone vocal assistants: the utterance produced by a human speaker (e.g. a question) is displayed…