Opportunities and Challenges for Adding Speech to Dialogues with a Council of Coaches

With the ageing of the population, more (chronic) diseases arise, putting ressure on the healthcare system. This requires a shift from treatment towards prevention of age related diseases by enabling the aging generation to stimulate them to take care of their own health and condition. The Council of Coaches project is developing a team of virtual coaches that can help older adults to achieve their health goals. Each coach offers insights and advice based on their expertise. The Council of Coaches enables multiparty interaction between multiple coaches and the users by leading user-coach, but also coach-coach conversations. Currently the Council of Coaches interacts with the coaches by selecting one of several predefined multiple choice options. Although this a robust method to capture user input, it is not ideal for elderly for several reasons, such as physical function loss. Spoken dialogues can offer a better user experience, but also come with many complexities. In this research topics, the state-of-art in this topic is investigated by answering multiple research (sub) questions. An extensive literature research has been conducted to gain knowledge about: Conversational Interfaces, Speech Recognizers, Virtual Coaching Systems and the Council of Coaches. This research topics serves as an approach for my thesis that attempts to answer the main question: To what extent can spoken interaction offer a valuable addition to the multiparty virtual Council of Coaches application?. All gained background knowledge will help with the adaption of the Council of Coach system to support spoken interactions.