Spoken dialogue systems: architectures and applications

171 p.Technology and technological devices have become habitual and omnipresent. Humans need to learn tocommunicate with all kind of devices. Until recently humans needed to learn how the devices expressthemselves to communicate with them. But in recent times the tendency has become to makecommunication with these devices in more intuitive ways. The ideal way to communicate with deviceswould be the natural way of communication between humans, the speech. Humans have long beeninvestigating and designing systems that use this type of communication, giving rise to the so-calledSpoken Dialogue Systems.In this context, the primary goal of the thesis is to show how these systems can be implemented.Additionally, the thesis serves as a review of the state-of-the-art regarding architectures and toolkits.Finally, the thesis is intended to serve future system developers as a guide for their construction. For that

Spoken dialogue systems: architectures and applications

171 p.Technology and technological devices have become habitual and omnipresent. Humans need to learn tocommunicate with all kind of devices. Until recently humans needed to learn how the devices expressthemselves to communicate with them. But in recent times the tendency has become to makecommunication with these devices in more intuitive ways. The ideal way to communicate with deviceswould be the natural way of communication between humans, the speech. Humans have long beeninvestigating and designing systems that use this type of communication, giving rise to the so-calledSpoken Dialogue Systems.In this context, the primary goal of the thesis is to show how these systems can be implemented.Additionally, the thesis serves as a review of the state-of-the-art regarding architectures and toolkits.Finally, the thesis is intended to serve future system developers as a guide for their construction. For that

Dialogue Management and Language Generation for a Robust Conversational Virtual Coach: Validation and User Study

Designing human–machine interactive systems requires cooperation between different disciplines is required. In this work, we present a Dialogue Manager and a Language Generator that are the core modules of a Voice-based Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) capable of carrying out challenging, long and complex coaching conversations. We also develop an efficient integration procedure of the whole system that will act as an intelligent and robust Virtual Coach. The coaching task significantly differs from the classical applications of SDSs, resulting in a much higher degree of complexity and difficulty. The Virtual Coach has been successfully tested and validated in a user study with independent elderly, in three different countries with three different languages and cultures: Spain, France and Norway.The research presented in this paper has been conducted as part of the project EMPATHIC that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant No. 769872. Additionally, this work has been partially funded by projects BEWORD and AMIC-PC of the Minister of Science of Technology, under Grant Nos. PID2021-126061OB-C42 and PDC2021-120846-C43, respectively. Vázquez and López Zorrilla received a PhD scholarship from the Basque Government, with Grant Nos. PRE 2020 1 0274 and PRE 2017 1 0357, respectively

Spoken dialogue systems: architectures and applications

171 p.Technology and technological devices have become habitual and omnipresent. Humans need to learn tocommunicate with all kind of devices. Until recently humans needed to learn how the devices expressthemselves to communicate with them. But in recent times the tendency has become to makecommunication with these devices in more intuitive ways. The ideal way to communicate with deviceswould be the natural way of communication between humans, the speech. Humans have long beeninvestigating and designing systems that use this type of communication, giving rise to the so-calledSpoken Dialogue Systems.In this context, the primary goal of the thesis is to show how these systems can be implemented.Additionally, the thesis serves as a review of the state-of-the-art regarding architectures and toolkits.Finally, the thesis is intended to serve future system developers as a guide for their construction. For that

A prototype based on a multimodal dialog system

En este trabajo se describe un prototipo basado en un sistema de diálogo multimodal desarrollado utilizando la arquitectura EDECÁN para la empresa Softec-Ibermática. Duración de la demostración: 10 min. aprox.The goal of this work is to develop a multimodal application based on a dialog system using EDECÁN architecture for Softec-Ibermática company. The demonstration takes 10 min. aprox.Este trabajo ha sido parcialmente financiado por la Consejería de Industria del Gobierno Vasco, la Universidad del País Vasco en el proyecto GIU07/57 y por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación mediante el proyecto TIN2008-06856-C05-01 y por el programa Consolider Ingenio-2010 MIPRCV (CSD2007-00018)

EMPATHIC: Coach virtual empático, expresivo y avanzado para mejorar el bienestar de las personas de edad avanzada sanas e independientes

The EMPATHIC project will research, innovate, explore and validate new paradigms and platforms, laying the foundation for future generations of Personalised Virtual Coaches to assist elderly people living independently at and around their home. Innovative multimodal face analytics, adaptive spoken dialogue systems and natural language interfaces are part of what the project will research and innovate, in order to help dependent aging persons and their carers. The project will use remote non-intrusive technologies to extract physiological markers of emotional states in real-time for online adaptive responses of the coach, and advance holistic modelling of behavioural, computational, physical and social aspects of a personalised expressive virtual coach. It will develop causal models of coach-user interactional exchanges that engage elders in emotionally believable interactions keeping off loneliness, sustaining health status, enhancing quality of life and simplifying access to future telecare services.El proyecto EMPATHIC tiene como misión investigar, explorar, innovar y validar nuevos paradigmas y plataformas, sentando las bases para las futuras generaciones de coach virtuales personalizados para ayudar a personas de avanzada edad que viven de forma independiente en su hogar. Además, EMPATHIC investigará e innovará con el objetivo de ayudar a las personas de avanzada edad dependientes y a sus cuidadores mediante análisis facial multimodal, sistemas de diálogo adaptables e interfaces de lenguaje natural. El proyecto utilizará tecnologías remotas no intrusivas para extraer marcadores fisiológicos de estados emocionales en tiempo real, las cuales influenciarán el comportamiento del coach. También se modelarán los aspectos computacionales, físicos y sociales de los coach virtuales expresivos desde un punto de vista holístico. Finalmente, se desarrollarán modelos que permitan la interacción entre el coach y el usuario, buscando así involucrar a éstos en interacciones que contribuyan a evitar la soledad, mantener el estado de salud, mejorar la calidad de vida y simplificar el acceso a futuros servicios de teleasistencia.This work has been founded by the European Commission H2020-SC1-2017-RIA grant number 769872: “Empathic, Expressive, Advanced Virtual Coach to Improve Independent Healthy-Life-Years of the Elderly”