An agent-based approach to dialogue management in personal assistants

Personal assistants need to allow the user to interact with the system in a flexible and adaptive way such as through spoken language dialogue. In this research we focus on an application in which the user can use a variety of devices to interact with a collection of personal assistants each specializing in a task domain such as email or calendar management, information seeking, etc. We propose an agent-based approach for developing the dialogue manager that acts as the central point maintaining continuous user-system interaction and coordinating the activities of the assistants. In addition, this approach enables development of multi-modal interfaces. We describe our initial implementation which contains an email management agent that the user can interact with through a spoken dialogue and an interface on PDAs. The dialogue manager was implemented by extending a BDI agent architecture. Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.2 [Artificial Intelligence]: Natural Language Processing, ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IUI
• Authors: Anh Nguyen, Wayne Wobcke
• Keywords: Dialogue Manager, IUI 2005, Personal Assistants, Software Engineering, Spoken Language Dialogue