Stephan Schlögl

WebWOZ: a wizard of oz prototyping framework

Language Technology (LT) based applications become more popular as technology improves. Prototyping early in the design process is critical for the development of high quality applications. It is difficult, however, to do low-fidelity prototyping (e.g. paper prototyping) of applications based on LT. One technique that has been used for this kind of prototyping is Wizard of Oz (WOZ). However, this generally involves the development of one-off user and wizard interfaces. A tool that facilitates the flexible integration of LT components into WOZ experiments is desirable. In this paper we explore the requirements for such a tool, drawing from the literature and a first WOZ experiment in which different wizards were observed and their behaviour was analysed.

Building the next generation of personal digital Assistants

Voice-based digital Assistants such as Apples Siri and Googles Now are currently booming. Yet, despite their promise of being context-aware and adapted to a users preferences and very distinct needs, truly personal assistants are still missing. In this paper we highlight some of the challenges in building personalized speech-operated assistive technology and propose a number of research and development directions we have undertaken in order to solve them. In particular we focus on natural language understanding and dialog management aspects as we believe that these parts of the technology pipeline require the biggest amount of augmentation.

Technology Acceptance of Virtual Reality for Travel Planning

The appearance of affordable hardware has made Virtual Reality (VR) one of 2015s most discussed electronic consumer devices. Its technological power lies in its intensity and the simulated realism it is able to provide. Although gaming is the main driver behind current developments, other domains may benefit as well. Tourism and destination management in particular can be considered for application. Within this context, this technology would not only allow for a more realistic pre-experience of potential destinations, but also enable tourism providers with novel ways of promoting their services to prospective tourists. In order to estimate the potential of VR in tourism, a survey based on the Technology Acceptance Model, has been conducted. After virtually travelling to a selected destination, participants had to complete a 36-item questionnaire. Results indicate significant effects of Perceived Immersion, Interest, Perceived Enjoyment and Perceived Usefulness on the Intention to Use VR technology for travel planning.

Exploring voice user interfaces for seniors

Recent product releases such as Apples Siri and Googles Voice Search have strongly emphasized the use of voice as a modern interaction modality. Seniors, in particular, might appreciate an alternative to small mobile phone keypads, touchpads and computer mice. This paper presents initial explorations of how elderly people would interact with language-technology-driven interfaces, how these interactions measure up against traditional physical interaction channels, and what features they may require to satisfy the needs of this very specific user group.

USING WIZARD OF OZ TO COLLECT INTERACTION DATA FOR VOICE CONTROLLED HOME CARE AND COMMUNICATION SERVICES

This research aims at providing Voice controlled As- sistive (vAssist) Care and Communication Services for the Home to seniors suffering from fine-motor problems and/or chronic diseases. The constantly growing life expectancy of the European population increasingly asks for techno- logical products that help seniors to manage their activities of daily living. In particular, we require solutions which offer interaction paradigms that fit the cognitive abilities of elderly users. Natural language-based access can be seen as one way of increasing the usability of these services. Yet, the construction of robust language technologies such as Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding does require sufficient domain specific in- teraction data. In this paper we describe how we plan to obtain the relevant corpus data for a set of different applica- tion scenarios, using the Wizard of Oz (WOZ) prototyping method. Using a publicly available WOZ tool we discuss how the integration of existing language technologies with a human wizard may help in designing a natural user inter- face for seniors and how such has the potential to underpin an iterative user-centred development process for language- based applications.

A Multi-lingual Evaluation of the vAssist Spoken Dialog System. Comparing Disco and RavenClaw

vAssist (Voice Controlled Assistive Care and Communication Services for the Home) is a European project for which several research institutes and companies have been working on the development of adapted spoken interfaces to support home care and communication services. This paper describes the spoken dialog system that has been built. Its natural language understanding module includes a novel reference resolver and it introduces a new hierarchical paradigm to model dialog tasks. The user-centered approach applied to the whole development process led to the setup of several experiment sessions with real users. Multilingual experiments carried out in Austria, France and Spain are described along with their analyses and results in terms of both system performance and user experience. An additional experimental comparison of the RavenClaw and Disco-LFF dialog managers built into the vAssist spoken dialog system highlighted similar performance and user acceptance.

The Roberta IRONSIDE project: A dialog capable humanoid personal assistant in a wheelchair for dependent persons

With an aging population and the financial difficulties of having a full time caregiver for every dependent person living at home, assistant robots appear to be a solution for advanced countries. However, most of what can be done with a robot can be done without it. So it is difficult to quantify what real value an assistant robot can add. Such a robot should be a real assistant capable of helping a person, whether indoors or outdoors. Additionally, the robot should be a companion for dialoging, as well as a system capable of detecting health problems. The Roberta Ironside project is a robotic evolution, embodying the expertise learned during the development of pure vocal personal assistants for dependent persons during the vAssist project (Sansen et al. 2014). The project proposes a relatively affordable and simplified design of a human-sized humanoid robot that fits the requirements of this analysis. After an overall description of the robot, the justification of the novel choice of a handicapped robot in an electric wheel-chair, this paper emphasizes the technology that is used for the head and the face and the subsequent verbal and non-verbal communication capabilities of the robot, in turn highlighting the characteristics of Embodied Conversational Agents.

What if everyone could do it?: a framework for easier spoken dialog system design

While Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) still represent the most common way of operating modern computing technology, Spoken Dialog Systems (SDS) have the potential to offer a more natural and intuitive mode of interaction. Even though some may say that existing speech recognition is neither reliable nor practical, the success of recent product releases such as Apples Siri or Nuances Dragon Drive suggests that language-based interaction is increasingly gaining acceptance. Yet, unlike applications for building GUIs, tools and frameworks that support the design, construction and maintenance of dialog systems are rare. A particular challenge of SDS design is the often complex integration of technologies. Systems usually consist of several components (e.g. speech recognition, language understanding, output generation, etc.), all of which require expertise to deploy them in a given application domain. This paper presents work in progress that aims at supporting this integration process. We propose a framework of components and describe how it may be used to prototype and gradually implement a spoken dialog system without requiring extensive domain expertise.

Do HCI and NLP interact

We examine the relationship between HCI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) by performing a bibliometric analysis and looking at the specific example of BioNLP. We identify opportunities for HCI to fertilise current NLP research and suggest that HCI will benefit from looking at advances in NLP more closely.

Design Science and ThinkLets as a Holistic Approach to Design IoT/IoS Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most important developments which will change not only businesses in many industries but also our personal life. In current literature, the technical aspects of IoT systems are dominant as they are the basic building blocks for new products, services and processes. Nevertheless, this is not enough to make IoT successful and sustainable in terms of user acceptance.