"Was that successful?" On Integrating Proactive Meta-Dialogue in a DIY-Assistant using Multimodal Cues

Abstract

Effectively supporting novices during performance of complex tasks, e.g. do-it-yourself (DIY) projects, requires intelligent assistants to be more than mere instructors. In order to be accepted as a competent and trustworthy cooperation partner, they need to be able to actively participate in the project and engage in helpful conversations with users when assistance is necessary. Therefore, a new proactive version of the DIY-assistant Robert is presented in this paper. It extends the previous prototype by including the capability to initiate reflective meta-dialogues using multimodal cues. Two different strategies for reflective dialogue are implemented: A progress-based strategy initiates a reflective dialogue about previous experience with the assistance for encouraging the self-appraisal of the user. An activity-based strategy is applied for providing timely, task-dependent support. Therefore, user activities with a connected drill driver are tracked that trigger dialogues in order to reflect on the current task and to prevent task failure. An experimental study comparing the proactive assistant against the baseline version shows that proactive meta-dialogue is able to build user trust significantly better than a solely reactive system. Besides, the results provide interesting insights for the development of proactive dialogue assistants.