Related papers: The SPACE THEA Project
Speaking aloud to a wearable AR assistant in public can be socially awkward, and re-articulating the same requests every day creates unnecessary effort. We present SpeechLess, a wearable AR assistant that introduces a speech-based intent…
We present TacoBot, a task-oriented dialogue system built for the inaugural Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, which assists users in completing multi-step cooking and home improvement tasks. TacoBot is designed with a user-centered principle…
Text-based online counselling scales across geographical and stigma barriers, yet faces practitioner shortages, lacks non-verbal cues and suffers inconsistent quality assurance. Whilst artificial intelligence offers promising solutions, its…
Increasingly complex and autonomous robots are being deployed in real-world environments with far-reaching consequences. High-stakes scenarios, such as emergency response or offshore energy platform and nuclear inspections, require robot…
Despite growing recognition that responsible AI requires domain knowledge, current work on conversational AI primarily draws on clinical expertise that prioritises diagnosis and intervention. However, much of everyday emotional support…
Conversational generative artificial intelligence agents (or genAI chatbots) could benefit youth mental health, yet young people's perspectives remain underexplored. We examined the Mental health Intelligence Agent (Mia), a genAI chatbot…
Spatial disorientation is a leading cause of fatal aircraft accidents. This paper explores the potential of AI agents to aid pilots in maintaining balance and preventing unrecoverable losses of control by offering cues and corrective…
While assistive robots have much potential to help older people with frailty-related needs, there are few in use. There is a gap between what is developed in laboratories and what would be viable in real-world contexts. Through a series of…
Artificial agents that support people in their daily activities (e.g., virtual coaches and personal assistants) are increasingly prevalent. Since many daily activities are social in nature, support agents should understand a user's social…
Voice assistants have recently achieved remarkable commercial success. However, the current generation of these devices is typically capable of only reactive interactions. In other words, interactions have to be initiated by the user, which…
Research interest in task-oriented dialogs has increased as systems such as Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri have become ubiquitous in everyday life. However, the impact of academic research in this area has been limited by the lack of…
A rapidly increasing amount of human conversation occurs online. But divisiveness and conflict can fester in text-based interactions on social media platforms, in messaging apps, and on other digital forums. Such toxicity increases…
This software project based paper is for a vision of the near future in which computer interaction is characterized by natural face-to-face conversations with lifelike characters that speak, emote, and gesture. The first step is speech. The…
People experiencing mental health crises frequently turn to open-ended generative AI (GenAI) chatbots for support. However, rather than providing immediate assistance, some GenAI chatbots are designed to respond to crisis situations in ways…
Socially assistive robots have the potential to improve group dynamics when interacting with groups of people in social settings. This work contributes to the understanding of those dynamics through a user study of trust dynamics in the…
Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of social conversation as well as free-form conversation over a broad range of domains and topics. To advance the state of the art in conversational…
The growing capabilities of large language models and multimodal systems have spurred interest in voice-first AI assistants, yet existing benchmarks are inadequate for evaluating the full range of these systems' capabilities. We introduce…
We designed and evaluated an AI pilot in a planetarium visualization software, OpenSpace, for public shows in science centers. The piloting role is usually given to a human working in close collaboration with the guide on stage. We…
One difficulty in using artificial agents for human-assistive applications lies in the challenge of accurately assisting with a person's goal(s). Existing methods tend to rely on inferring the human's goal, which is challenging when there…
The Environmental Acoustic Reconnaissance and Sounding experiment (EARS), is composed of two parts: the Environmental Acoustic Reconnaissance (EAR) instrument and the Environmental Acoustic Sounding Experiment (EASE). They are distinct, but…