A Multi-stage Approach to Facilitate Interaction with Intelligent Environments via Natural Language

Abstract

Due to the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the emergence of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm, the need to facilitate the interaction between the user and the services that are integrated in Intelligent Environments has surfaced. As a result, Conversational Agents are increasingly used in this context, in order to achieve a natural, intuitive and seamless interaction between the user and the system. However, in spite of the continuous progress and advancements in the area of Conversational Agents, there are still some considerable limitations in current approaches. The system proposed in this paper addresses some of the main drawbacks by: (a) automatically integrating new services based on their formal specification, (b) incorporating error handling via follow-up questions, and (c) processing multiple user intents through the segmentation of the input. The paper describes the main components of the system, as well as the technologies that they utilize. Additionally, it analyses the pipeline process of the user input, which results in the generation of a response and the invocation of the appropriate intelligent services.