Related papers: An Analysis of Dialogue Repair in Virtual Voice As…
Spoken dialogue systems have transformed human-machine interaction by providing real-time responses to queries. However, misunderstandings between the user and system persist. This study explores the significance of interactional language…
Maintaining mutual understanding is a key component in human-human conversation to avoid conversation breakdowns, in which repair, particularly Other-Initiated Repair (OIR, when one speaker signals trouble and prompts the other to resolve),…
Training dialog policies for speech-based virtual assistants requires a plethora of conversational data. The data collection phase is often expensive and time consuming due to human involvement. To address this issue, a common solution is…
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;…
Intelligent assistants (IAs) such as Siri and Cortana conversationally interact with users and execute a wide range of actions (e.g., searching the Web, setting alarms, and chatting). IAs can support these actions through the combination of…
Virtual assistants, also known as intelligent conversational systems such as Google's Virtual Assistant and Apple's Siri, interact with human-like responses to users' queries and finish specific tasks. Meanwhile, existing recommendation…
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…
Interactive spoken dialog provides many new challenges for spoken language systems. One of the most critical is the prevalence of speech repairs. This paper presents an algorithm that detects and corrects speech repairs based on finding the…
Modern virtual personal assistants provide a convenient interface for completing daily tasks via voice commands. An important consideration for these assistants is the ability to recover from automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural…
Many businesses and consumers are extending the capabilities of voice-based services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri to create custom voice experiences (also known as skills). As the number of these…
Joint narratives are often used in the context of reconciliation interventions for people in social conflict situations, which arise, for example, due to ethnic or religious differences. The interventions aim to encourage a change in…
Voice-based communication is often cited as one of the most `natural' ways in which humans and robots might interact, and the recent availability of accurate automatic speech recognition and intelligible speech synthesis has enabled…
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…
Interactions with virtual assistants typically start with a predefined trigger phrase followed by the user command. To make interactions with the assistant more intuitive, we explore whether it is feasible to drop the requirement that users…
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…
Speech repairs occur often in spontaneous spoken dialogues. The ability to detect and correct those repairs is necessary for any spoken language system. We present a framework to detect and correct speech repairs where all relevant levels…
In this thesis, we present a statistical language model for resolving speech repairs, intonational boundaries and discourse markers. Rather than finding the best word interpretation for an acoustic signal, we redefine the speech recognition…
People with special needs like blind and visually impaired (BVI) people can particularly benefit from using voice assistants providing spoken information input and output in everyday life. However, it is crucial to understand their needs…
Voice assistants' inability to serve people-of-color and non-native English speakers has largely been documented as a quality-of-service harm. However, little work has investigated what downstream harms propagate from this poor service. How…
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…