The virtual interactive presenter: a conversational character for interactive television

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a conversational interface for interactive TV. With the advent of multi-channel digital TV, accessing Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs) will become increasingly complex. We claim that a conversational interface can support incremental refinement of user selections, thus assisting user choice without requiring extensive knowledge of the editorial categories used in the EPG. We present the system architecture and describe the building blocks of this system in terms of underlying technologies, namely speech recognition, Natural Language Processing, dialogue modelling, character animation and multi-modal presentation. The use of an animated character appears to influence the implementation of each of these basic techniques. After giving an overview of the system behaviour and architecture, we describe the various building blocks of a conversational agent as implemented in our system and to what extent each of the underlying technologies are influenced by the use of a conversational character. We report current results by describing example dialogues from the system. Finally, we compare our approach with other interface agents' paradigms.