The Virtual Interactive Presenter: A Conversational Interface for Interactive Television

With the advent of multi-channel digital TV, accessing Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs) will become increasingly complex. This paper describes ongoing work in the development of a conversational interface for Interactive TV. We claim that a conversational interface can support incremental refinement of user selections thus assisting user choice without requiring knowledge of editorial categories. We describe the system architecture, which integrates various components dedicated to language processing, EPG access and animation of the conversational character. Finally, we discuss the control strategy for the whole system from the perspective of human-computer dialogue.