Topic Switching System for Unfamiliar Couples in Face-to-Face Conversations

This paper proposes a conversation support system for unfamiliar couples. Some of the people are weak at making conversations with a person for the first time. Especially, they may feel more awkward if the conversation partners gender is different from his/hers. It is so hard to find suitable topics for the conversations that are suitable for them to enjoy the conversations. If any topic can not be found, the non-speech section will come to the conversation and will make the conversation partners be more awkward. The proposed system presents topics to the users. As inputting the users profile data into the system, the conversation topics are recommended referring the input. The proposed system recognizes their speeches in their conversation, and detects the non-speech sections in their conversation. If the non-speech section is detected, the system switches the topic to new topics and presents the new topics to the users. They can continue their conversation if non-speech sections come more than one time. We experimented the efficiency of the proposed system in decreasing the non-speech section in conversations.