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We tackle the challenge of building real-world multimodal assistants for complex real-world tasks. We describe the practicalities and challenges of developing and deploying GRILLBot, a leading (first and second prize winning in 2022 and…
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…
With children talking to smart-speakers, smart-phones and even smart-microwaves daily, it is increasingly important to educate students on how these agents work-from underlying mechanisms to societal implications. Researchers are developing…
One of the most interesting aspects of the Amazon Alexa Prize competition is that the framing of the competition requires the development of new computational models of dialogue and its structure. Traditional computational models of…
Traditional goal-oriented dialogue systems rely on various components such as natural language understanding, dialogue state tracking, policy learning and response generation. Training each component requires annotations which are hard to…
This paper presents the second version of the dialogue system named Alquist competing in Amazon Alexa Prize 2018. We introduce a system leveraging ontology-based topic structure called topic nodes. Each of the nodes consists of several…
The goal of building dialogue agents that can converse with humans naturally has been a long-standing dream of researchers since the early days of artificial intelligence. The well-known Turing Test proposed to judge the ultimate validity…
This is the application document for the 2019 Amazon Alexa competition. We give an overall vision of our conversational experience, as well as a sample conversation that we would like our dialog system to achieve by the end of the…
Conversational systems use spoken language to interact with their users. Although conversational systems, such as Amazon Alexa, are becoming common and afford interesting functionalities, there is little known about the issues users of…
Current conversational systems can follow simple commands and answer basic questions, but they have difficulty maintaining coherent and open-ended conversations about specific topics. Competitions like the Conversational Intelligence…
We present our SocialBot -- Alquist~5.0 -- developed for the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge~5. Building upon previous versions of our system, we introduce the NRG Barista and outline several innovative approaches for integrating…
Growing up in an artificial intelligence-filled world, with Siri and Amazon Alexa often within arm's - or speech's - reach, could have significant impact on children. Conversational agents could influence how students anthropomorphize…
Introducing curiosities in a conversation is a way to teach something new to the person in a pleasant and enjoyable way. Enriching dialogues with contextualized curiosities can improve the users' perception of a dialog system and their…
We present Sounding Board, a social chatbot that won the 2017 Amazon Alexa Prize. The system architecture consists of several components including spoken language processing, dialogue management, language generation, and content management,…
The communication of potential students with a university department is performed manually and it is a very time consuming procedure. The opportunity to communicate with on a one-to-one basis is highly valued. However with many hundreds of…
Conversational Intelligence requires that a person engage on informational, personal and relational levels. Advances in Natural Language Understanding have helped recent chatbots succeed at dialog on the informational level. However,…
Dialog evaluation is a challenging problem, especially for non task-oriented dialogs where conversational success is not well-defined. We propose to evaluate dialog quality using topic-based metrics that describe the ability of a…
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…
The open domain-dialogue system Alquist has a goal to conduct a coherent and engaging conversation that can be considered as one of the benchmarks of social intelligence. The fourth version of the system, developed within the Alexa Prize…
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can profoundly affect reciprocal social communication, resulting in substantial and challenging impairments. One aspect is that for people with ASD conversations in everyday life are challenging due to…