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Today, most large-scale conversational AI agents (e.g. Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant) are built using manually annotated data to train the different components of the system. Typically, the accuracy of the ML models in these components…
Assistive robot arms can help humans by partially automating their desired tasks. Consider an adult with motor impairments controlling an assistive robot arm to eat dinner. The robot can reduce the number of human inputs -- and how precise…
Video is a powerful medium for communication and storytelling, yet reauthoring existing footage remains challenging. Even simple edits often demand expertise, time, and careful planning, constraining how creators envision and shape their…
Mobile access to information is a considerable problem for many users, especially to information found on the Web. In this paper, we explore how a voice-controlled service, accessible by telephone, could support mobile users' needs for…
Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software has proven to be a complex problem. Devices often require users to switch to companion smartphone apps in order to navigate permissions menus for…
Conversational assistants often require a question rewriting algorithm that leverages a subset of past interactions to provide a more meaningful (accurate) answer to the user's question or request. However, the exact rewriting approach may…
Intelligent conversational assistants, such as Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Echo, have quickly become a part of our digital life. However, these assistants have major limitations, which prevents users from conversing with…
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…
In general, self help systems are being increasingly deployed by service based industries because they are capable of delivering better customer service and increasingly the switch is to voice based self help systems because they provide a…
Audio descriptions make videos accessible to those who cannot see them by describing visual content in audio. Producing audio descriptions is challenging due to the synchronous nature of the audio description that must fit into gaps of…
Intelligent personal assistants (IPA) enable voice applications that facilitate people's daily tasks. However, due to the complexity and ambiguity of voice requests, some requests may not be handled properly by the standard natural language…
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 Idiolect, an open source (https://github.com/OpenASR/idiolect) IDE plugin for voice coding and a novel approach to building bots that allows for users to define custom commands on-the-fly. Unlike traditional chatbots,…
Virtual Assistant technology is rapidly proliferating to improve productivity in a variety of tasks. While several virtual assistants for everyday tasks are well-known (e.g., Siri, Cortana, Alexa), assistants for specialty tasks such as…
People frequently use speech-to-text systems to compose short texts with voice. However, current voice-based interfaces struggle to support composing more detailed, contextually complex texts, especially in scenarios where users are on 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…
Conversational AIs, or chatbots, mimic human speech when conversing. Smart assistants facilitate the automation of several tasks that needed human intervention earlier. Because of their accuracy, absence of dependence on human resources,…
When deployed, AI agents will encounter problems that are beyond their autonomous problem-solving capabilities. Leveraging human assistance can help agents overcome their inherent limitations and robustly cope with unfamiliar situations. We…
Emerging experimental evidence shows that writing with AI assistance can change both the views people express in writing and the opinions they hold afterwards. Yet, we lack substantive understanding of procedural and behavioral changes in…
Recognition errors are common in human communication. Similar errors often lead to unwanted behaviour in dialogue systems or virtual assistants. In human communication, we can recover from them by repeating misrecognized words or phrases;…