How to write health dialog for a talking computer

AbstractAutomated dialogue systems delivered over the telephone offer a promising approach to delivering health-related interventions to populations of individuals at low-cost. Over the past two decades, an automated telephone system called Telephone-Linked Care or TLC has been successfully designed and evaluated by the authors and their colleagues. This work has resulted in over twenty systems for various health-related conditions and lifestyle behaviors. This paper describes our approach to developing and writing dialogue for these automated telephone systems, including determining the program objectives, defining the target population, and selecting a theory of behavior change to guide the intervention. Both macro and micro issues are considered in constructing dialogue systems that are engaging for the target population, easy to use, and effective at promoting positive health behaviors and outcomes

Interactive online health promotion interventions:a “health check”

As an increasingly popular medium by which to access health promotion information, the Internet offers significant potential to promote (often individualized) health-related behavioral change across broad populations. Interactive online health promotion interventions are a key means, therefore, by which to empower individuals to make important well being and treatment decisions. But how ldquohealthyrdquo are interactive online health promotion interventions? This paper discusses a literature review (or ldquohealth checkrdquo) of interactive online health interventions. It highlights the types of interactive interventions currently available and identifies areas in which research attention is needed in order to take full advantage for the Internet for effective health promotion

Adaptable dialogue architecture and runtime engine (AdaRTE): A framework for rapid prototyping of health dialog systems

International audienceSpoken dialog systems have been increasingly employed to provide ubiquitous access via telephone to information and services for the non-Internet-connected public. They have been successfully applied in the health care context; however, speech technology requires a considerable development investment. The advent of VoiceXML reduced the proliferation of incompatible dialog formalisms, at the expense of adding even more complexity. This paper introduces a novel architecture for dialogue representation and interpretation, AdaRTE, which allows developers to lay out dialog interactions through a high-level formalism, offering both declarative and procedural features. AdaRTE's aim is to provide a ground for deploying complex and adaptable dialogs whilst allowing experimentation and incremental adoption of innovative speech technologies. It enhances augmented transition networks with dynamic behavior, and drives multiple back-end realizers, including VoiceXML. It has been especially targeted to the health care context, because of the great scale and the need for reducing the barrier to a widespread adoption of dialog systems

Sistemas de diálogo: una revisión

Spoken dialogue systems are computer programs developed to interact with users employing speech in order to provide them with specific automated services. The interaction is carried out by means of dialogue turns, which in many studies available in the literature, researchers aim to make as similar as possible to those between humans in terms of naturalness, intelligence and affective content. In this paper we describe the fundaments of these systems including the main technologies employed for their development. We also present an evolution of this technology and discuss some current applications. Moreover, we discuss development paradigms, including scripting languages and the development of conversational interfaces for mobile apps. The correct modelling of the user is a key aspect of this technology. This is why we also describe affective, personality and contextual models. Finally, we address some current research trends in terms of verbal communication, multimodal interaction and dialogue management.Los sistemas de diálogo son programas de ordenador desarrollados para interaccionar con los usuarios mediante habla, con la finalidad de proporcionarles servicios automatizados. La interacción se lleva a cabo mediante turnos de un tipo de diálogo que, en muchos estudios existentes en la literatura, los investigadores intentan que se parezca lo más posible al diálogo real que se lleva a cabo entre las personas en lo que se refiere a naturalidad, inteligencia y contenido afectivo. En este artículo describimos los fundamentos de esta tecnología, incluyendo las tecnologías básicas que se utilizan para implementar este tipo de sistemas. También presentamos una evolución de la tecnología y comentamos algunas aplicaciones actuales. Asimismo, describimos paradigmas de interacción, incluyendo lenguajes de script y desarrollo de interfaces conversacionales para aplicaciones móviles. Un aspecto clave de esta tecnología consiste en realizar un correcto modelado del usuario. Por este motivo, discutimos diversos modelos afectivos, de personalidad y contextuales. Finalmente, comentamos algunas líneas de investigación actuales relacionadas con la comunicación verbal, interacción multimodal y gestión del diálogo

Usability engineering of interactive voice responsive (IVR) systems in oral users of Southern Africa

Includes bibliographical references (p. 96-109).This research study focuses on the feasibility of using the telephone as a tool for information access in the oral communities of Southern Africa. The OpenPhone and BGR systems are used as case studies and their designs have been influenced by field studies with the targeted users. The OpenPhone project aims to design an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) health information system that enables people who are caregivers for HIV/AIDS infected children to access relevant care-giving information by using a telephone in their native language of Setswana in Botswana, Southern Africa. The BGR system allows soccer fans to access results of recently played matches in Premier Soccer League (PSL) of South Africa

Constructing a low-cost, open-source, VoiceXML

Voice-enabled applications, applications that interact with a user via an audio channel, are used extensively today. Their use is growing as speech related technologies improve, as speech is one of the most natural methods of interaction. They can provide customer support as IVRs, can be used as an assistive technology, or can become an aural interface to the Internet. Given that the telephone is used extensively throughout the globe, the number of potential users of voice-enabled applications is very high. VoiceXML is a popular, open, high-level, standard means of creating voice-enabled applications which was designed to bring the benefits of web based development to services. While VoiceXML is an ideal language for creating these applications, VoiceXML gateways, the hardware and software responsible for interpreting VoiceXML applications and interfacing with the PSTN, are still expensive and so there is a need for a low-cost gateway. Asterisk, and open-source, TDM/VoIP telephony platform, can be used as a low-cost PSTN interface. This thesis investigates adding a VoiceXML service to Asterisk, creating a low-cost VoiceXML prototype gateway which is able to render voice-enabled applications. Following the Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) paradigm, the VoiceXML gateway is divided into a set of components which are sourced from the open-source community, and integrated to create the gateway. The browser requires a VoiceXML interpreter (OpenVXI), a Text-To-Speech engine (Festival) and a speech recognition engine (Sphinx 4). The integration of the components results in a low-cost, open-source VoiceXML gateway. System tests show that the integration of the components was successful, and that the system can handle concurrent calls. A fully compliant version of the gateway can be used in the real world to render voice-enabled applications at a low cost.KMBT_363Adobe Acrobat 9.55 Paper Capture Plug-i

Constructing a low-cost, open-source, VoiceXML

Voice-enabled applications, applications that interact with a user via an audio channel, are used extensively today. Their use is growing as speech related technologies improve, as speech is one of the most natural methods of interaction. They can provide customer support as IVRs, can be used as an assistive technology, or can become an aural interface to the Internet. Given that the telephone is used extensively throughout the globe, the number of potential users of voice-enabled applications is very high. VoiceXML is a popular, open, high-level, standard means of creating voice-enabled applications which was designed to bring the benefits of web based development to services. While VoiceXML is an ideal language for creating these applications, VoiceXML gateways, the hardware and software responsible for interpreting VoiceXML applications and interfacing with the PSTN, are still expensive and so there is a need for a low-cost gateway. Asterisk, and open-source, TDM/VoIP telephony platform, can be used as a low-cost PSTN interface. This thesis investigates adding a VoiceXML service to Asterisk, creating a low-cost VoiceXML prototype gateway which is able to render voice-enabled applications. Following the Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) paradigm, the VoiceXML gateway is divided into a set of components which are sourced from the open-source community, and integrated to create the gateway. The browser requires a VoiceXML interpreter (OpenVXI), a Text-To-Speech engine (Festival) and a speech recognition engine (Sphinx 4). The integration of the components results in a low-cost, open-source VoiceXML gateway. System tests show that the integration of the components was successful, and that the system can handle concurrent calls. A fully compliant version of the gateway can be used in the real world to render voice-enabled applications at a low cost.KMBT_363Adobe Acrobat 9.55 Paper Capture Plug-i