Related papers: The SPACE THEA Project
In this chapter, we provide a review of conversational agents (CAs), discussing chatbots, intended for casual conversation with a user, as well as task-oriented agents that generally engage in discussions intended to reach one or several…
Effective communication is essential in collaborative tasks, so AI-equipped robots working alongside humans need to be able to explain their behaviour in order to cooperate effectively and earn trust. We analyse and classify communications…
Wearable devices such as AI glasses are transforming voice assistants into always-available, hands-free collaborators that integrate seamlessly with daily life, but they also introduce challenges like egocentric audio affected by motion and…
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to make machine learning models transparent and trustworthy, yet most current approaches communicate explanations visually or through text. This paper introduces an information theoretic…
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…
Designing Conversational AI systems to support older adults requires more than usability and reliability, it also necessitates robustness in handling conversational breakdowns. In this study, we investigate how older adults navigate and…
As human-robot collaboration opportunities continue to expand, trust becomes ever more important for full engagement and utilization of robots. Affective trust, built on emotional relationship and interpersonal bonds is particularly…
Technologies for enhancing well-being, healthcare vigilance and monitoring are on the rise. However, despite patient interest, such technologies suffer from low adoption. One hypothesis for this limited adoption is loss of human interaction…
Recently, there has been growing attention on behalf of both academic and practice communities towards the ability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to operate responsibly and ethically. As a result, a plethora of frameworks and…
Conversational agents are consistently growing in popularity and many people interact with them every day. While many conversational agents act as personal assistants, they can have many different goals. Some are task-oriented, such as…
Voice assistants have become quite popular lately while in parallel they are an important part of smarthome systems. Through their voice assistants, users can perform various tasks, control other devices and enjoy third party services. The…
Robots in urban environments will inevitably encounter situations beyond their capabilities (e.g., delivery robots unable to press traffic light buttons), necessitating bystander assistance. These spontaneous collaborations possess…
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in daily life, designing intuitive, trustworthy, and emotionally resonant AI-human interfaces has emerged as a critical challenge. This editorial introduces a Special Issue that…
Engaging with AI assistants to gather essential information in a timely manner is becoming increasingly common. Traditional activation methods, like wake words such as Hey Siri, Ok Google, and Hey Alexa, are constrained by technical…
Recent advances in language and speech modelling have made it possible to build autonomous voice assistants that understand and generate human dialogue in real time. These systems are increasingly being deployed in domains such as customer…
Trust is essential for our interactions with others but also with artificial intelligence (AI) based systems. To understand whether a user trusts an AI, researchers need reliable measurement tools. However, currently discussed markers…
Chatbots, the common moniker for collaborative assistants, are Artificial Intelligence (AI) software that enables people to naturally interact with them to get tasks done. Although chatbots have been studied since the dawn of AI, they have…
In recent years, many works have investigated the feasibility of conversational robots for performing specific tasks, such as healthcare and interview. Along with this development comes a practical issue: how should we synthesize robotic…
In task-oriented dialogues with symbiotic robots, the robot usually takes the initiative in dialogue progression and topic selection. In such robot-driven dialogue, the user's sense of participation in the dialogue is reduced because the…
As part of a perennial project, our team is actively engaged in developing new synthetic assistant (SA) technologies to assist in training combat medics and medical first responders. It is critical that medical first responders are well…