A Dialogue System for Robots using VoiceXML Louise Funke & Marc Bauer 2007/12/11 EDA171/DATN06 Language Processing and Computational Linguistics Pierre Nugues
Structure SME robot Dialogue systems Example dialogue VoiceXML Our program Demo Pro & Contra VoiceXML Future
SME robot EU project to develop a robot for small & medium enterprises Task: a dialogue system to program it!
Dialogue systems a computer system intended for machine- human interaction may contain text, speech, graphics, gestures, etc. our task: program to fill in a form of known limits with voice Input saved in a file for further processing
Dialogue systems (picture)
Example dialogue Robot: Welcome to the SME robot voice operating system. Please choose one of the following options. Wood sign process, (...) Human: (I’d like) wood sign process (please). Robot: You have chosen the wood sign process. Do you want to continue? Human: Yes. Robot: Step one, configuration of wood sign variables. What kind of shape do you want? Sharp corners, soft corners or cut corners. Human: Soft corners (please). Robot: You have chosen soft corners. Is that correct? Human: Yes. (...)
VoiceXML “is the W3C's standard XML format for specifying interactive voice dialogues between a human and a computer.” Developed in Tellme Studio Server sided interpretation & execution (speech recognition software already existing in the system) Client connects via Skype or telephone
Our program (part of code) (...) Step one, configuration of wood sign variables. What kind of shape do you want? Sharp corners, soft corners or cut corners. <![CDATA[ [ [(sharp corners) (sharp)] { } [(soft corners) (soft)] { } [(cut corners) (cut)] { } ] ]]>
Our program (part of code - 2) You have chosen Is that correct?
Demo Time for a little demonstration...
Pro & Contra VoiceXML Pro: Easy to program Listens to key words Extendable with JavaScript, Perl, etc. Contra: Noise!!! (leading to misinterpretation) Code not flexible - new task == new code
Future Full integration to the robot Complex exception catching (noise, dialects) Mixed initiative More tasks, more options, more navigation.. Global commands Etc.