Conversational Agents for Physical World Navigation

This chapter presents a design process for developing a conversational navigation agent for visually impaired pedestrians where communication runs in natural language. This approach brings a lot of new problems with opportunity to solve them in nontraditional ways. The conversation with the agent is an example of a problem-solving process with several complex parts of the solution needed to be executed by the user. The user can ask additional questions about each part of the solution, thus adaptively changing the level of detail of information acquired, or to alternate the whole process to fit user preferences. In this way, the agent can replace a human navigator. Using this design process exemplar, we provide guidance on creating similar conversational agents, which utilize a natural language user interface. The guidance is supported by the results of several experiments conducted with participants with visual impairments.