Conversational Strategies for Robustly Managing Dialog in Public Spaces

Abstract

Open environments present an attention management challenge for conversational systems. We describe a kiosk system (based on Ravenclaw‐Olympus) that uses simple auditory and visual information to interpret human presence and manage the system’s attention. The system robustly differentiates intended interactions from unintended ones at an accuracy of 93% and provides similar task completion rates in both a quiet room and a public space.