Integrated Natural Spoken Dialogue System of Jijo-2 Mobile Robot for Office Services

Abstract

Our Jijo-2 robot, whose purpose is to provide office services, such as answering queries about people's location, route guidance, and delivery tasks, is expected to conduct natural spoken conversation with the office dwellers. This paper describes dialogue technologies implemented on our Jijo-2 office robot, i.e. noise-free voice acquisition system by a microphone array, inference of under-specified referents and zero pronouns using the attentional states, and context-sensitive construction of semantic frames from fragmented utterances. The behavior of the dialogue system integrated with the sound source detection, navigation, and face recognition vision is demonstrated in real dialogue examples in a real office. Motivation To extend applications of robots from routine tasks in traditional factories to flexible services in the offices and homes, robots are expected to have better man-machine interfaces for two reasons: (1) such settings are more dynamic and therefore requi...