The WOOL Dialogue Platform: Enabling Interdisciplinary User-Friendly Development of Dialogue for Conversational Agents

Abstract

Health coaching applications can include (embodied) conversational agents as coaches. The development of these agents requires an interdisciplinary cooperation between eHealth application developers, interaction designers and domain experts. Therefore, proper dialogue authoring tools and tools to integrate these dialogues in a conversational agent system are essential in the process of creating successful agent-based applications. However, we found no existing open source, easy-to-use authoring tools that support multidisciplinary agent development. To that end, we developed the WOOL Dialogue Platform. The WOOL Dialogue Platform provides the eHealth and conversational agent communities with an open source platform, consisting of a set of easy to use tools that facilitate virtual agent development. The platform consists of a dialogue definition language, an editor, application development libraries and a web service. To illustrate the platform’s possibilities and use in practice, we describe two use cases from EU Horizon 2020 research projects. The WOOL Dialogue Platform is an ‘easy to use, and powerful if needed’ platform for the development of conversational agent applications that is seeing a slow but steady increase in uptake in the eHealth community. Developed to support dialogue authoring for embodied conversational agents in the health coaching domain, this platform’s strong points are its ease of use and ability to let domain experts and agents technology experts work together by providing all parties with tools that support their work effectively.