Transferable Multi-Modal Dialogue Systems for Interactive Entertainment

Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment II

Volume

Papers from the 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

We present and demonstrate a dialogue system for multi-modal conversations with autonomous mobile robots, and argue that it could feasibly be used in games where a user controls a variety of Non-Player-Character (NPC) `bots'. Moreover, the `plug-and-play' nature of the system makes it `transferable' in the sense of being portable to conversations with robots which have different abilities and vocabularies. This modularization of the dialogue manager is achieved via a level of abstraction over robot `activities’ which allows game developers to use the system with very minimal linguistic knowledge. We illustrate these ideas by demonstrating a dialogue interface to the (simulated) WITAS robot helicopter, or UAV (`Unmanned Aerial Vehicle'). We argue that this type of system points the way forward in the development of conversational systems in games.