Motivations, Classification and Model Trial of Conversational Agents for Insurance Companies

Advances in artificial intelligence have renewed interest in conversational agents. So-called chatbots have reached maturity for industrial applications. German insurance companies are interested in improving their customer service and digitizing their business processes. In this work we investigate the potential use of conversational agents in insurance companies by determining which classes of agents are of interest to insurance companies, finding relevant use cases and requirements, and developing a prototype for an exemplary insurance scenario. Based on this approach, we derive key findings for conversational agent implementation in insurance companies.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure, accepted for presentation at The International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence 2019 (ICAART 2019

Proceedings of the 3rd IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects

These are the Proceedings of the 3rd IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects. Objects that we use in our everyday life are expanding their restricted interaction capabilities and provide functionalities that go far beyond their original functionality. They feature computing capabilities and are thus able to capture information, process and store it and interact with their environments, turning them into smart objects

VUI Design

This project examines voice-based user interfaces (VUI) for information systems and the design challenges that they present. The architecture of a voice activated information system is complex and understanding human speech is no small task for a machine. However, the ability to identify the spoken word and produce text is largely a utility today; available freely in open source projects or baked into popular platforms. Thus, software developers find themselves with the means to build into their solutions another dimension of input mechanisms should they be able to wield it. To explore the design challenges that must be overcome once an application has finished listening, this project relies on two experiments to provide insight into how domain and context shape natural language understanding and drive human interactions by a machine. In the process, implications for future systems and potential interactions will be uncovered and discussed

I feel you: the design and evaluation of a domotic affect-sensitive spoken conversational agent

We describe the work on infusion of emotion into a limited-task autonomous spoken conversational agent situated in the domestic environment, using a need-inspired task-independent emotion model (NEMO). In order to demonstrate the generation of affect through the use of the model, we describe the work of integrating it with a natural-language mixed-initiative HiFi-control spoken conversational agent (SCA). NEMO and the host system communicate externally, removing the need for the Dialog Manager to be modified, as is done in most existing dialog systems, in order to be adaptive. The first part of the paper concerns the integration between NEMO and the host agent. The second part summarizes the work on automatic affect prediction, namely, frustration and contentment, from dialog features, a non-conventional source, in the attempt of moving towards a more user-centric approach. The final part reports the evaluation results obtained from a user study, in which both versions of the agent (non-adaptive and emotionally-adaptive) were compared. The results provide substantial evidences with respect to the benefits of adding emotion in a spoken conversational agent, especially in mitigating users' frustrations and, ultimately, improving their satisfaction

Magical Board Theatre: interactive stories that can be played on multiple boards: two educational prototypes

Interactive storytelling uses in education are limited by the time required for its production and the ephemeral nature of interaction systems, leading inter-active stories to have a short usefulness life. We have developed the concept of platform-independent interactive stories, called virtual choreographies, enabling interactive stories to be replayed on novel technological platforms as they emerge, tackling the second half of this problem. The first part was also approached via a graphical storyboarding approach. Both aspects have been prototyped in a demonstration, called Magical Board Theatre (“Teatro de Tabuleiro Mágico”, original Portuguese name). We present this prototype, including its storyboarding tool, summarize the virtual choreographies ap-proach, and demonstrate how the prototype operationalizes them with story and platform examples.This work is co-financed by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fundthrough the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalization - COMPETE 2020 and the Lisboa 2020 under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the Portuguese National Innovation Agency (ANI) as a part of project CHIC «POCI-01-0247-FEDER-024498»".info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Game-inspired Pedagogical Conversational Agents: A Systematic Literature Review

Pedagogical conversational agents (PCAs) are an innovative way to help learners improve their academic performance via intelligent dialog systems. However, PCAs have not yet reached their full potential. They often fail because users perceive conversations with them as not engaging. Enriching them with game-based approaches could contribute to mitigating this issue. One could enrich a PCA with game-based approaches by gamifying it to foster positive effects, such as fun and motivation, or by integrating it into a game-based learning (GBL) environment to promote effects such as social presence and enable individual learning support. We summarize PCAs that are combined with game-based approaches under the novel term “game-inspired PCAs”. We conducted a systematic literature review on this topic, as previous literature reviews on PCAs either have not combined the topics of PCAs and GBL or have done so to a limited extent only. We analyzed the literature regarding the existing design knowledge base, the game elements used, the thematic areas and target groups, the PCA roles and types, the extent of artificial intelligence (AI) usage, and opportunities for adaptation. We reduced the initial 3,034 records to 50 fully coded papers, from which we derived a morphological box and revealed current research streams and future research recommendations. Overall, our results show that the topic offers promising application potential but that scholars and practitioners have not yet considered it holistically. For instance, we found that researchers have rarely provided prescriptive design knowledge, have not sufficiently combined game elements, and have seldom used AI algorithms as well as intelligent possibilities of user adaptation in PCA development. Furthermore, researchers have scarcely considered certain target groups, thematic areas, and PCA roles. Consequently, our paper contributes to research and practice by addressing research gaps and structuring the existing knowledge base