First time encounters with Roberta : a humanoid assistant for conversational autobiography creation

During eNTERFACE we developed a dialog system design and conversation material for Roberta, an anthropomorphic assistant robot. The focus was on the first stage of what we call LifeLine dialogs, i.e. the conversational creation of users’ life stories. Our goal is to help senior citizens record semiautobiographical narratives while combating the deterioration of memory and speech abilities. We successfully completed modelling dialog scenarios for first time users. This allows Roberta to personalize future conversations based on each user’s place of origin, work and education history, and hobbies, which are all information gathered during a user’s first conversation with Roberta. We accomplished this through (1) an adaptable dialog system with topic management and multi-modal functionalities (specifically face recognition), by extending a RavenClaw-type dialog management framework, (2) using the Wizard of Oz (WOZ) data collection technique for categorizing introductory conversation material and identifying semantic rules and concepts, and (3) simulating the customization of a user’s relationship with Roberta by introducing wizard-controlled contextual data, conversation history, and emotion awareness.