Joris Hulstijn and Arjan van Hessen
University of Twente
The Netherlands
{ joris | hessen }@cs.utwente.nl
1. Transaction Dialogues
Obligations
Transactions (ticket reservation, distant selling) involve obligations of both parties: the system should provide all relevant information; the user should feel committed to the transaction.
Theatre Information and Reservation
Our prototype, SCHISMA, is a mixed-initiative dialogue system for theatre information and ticket reservation. Based on user utterance, context and plan, the dialogue manger selects a response action. A response action is a combination of database manipulation and dialogue acts.
Information status
Utterance generation has a great impact on the usability of dialogue systems. Wording and intonation should reflect the status of information in the dialogue. As a rule, given information items are de-accented, expressed as a pronoun or left implicit. Salient or contrastive elements are accented. Verification prompts are distinguished by a rising intonation, to indicate insecurity.
Personality
We want a system with a personality, reflected in the nature of the prompts. We like to compare a curt, efficient system with a polite, elaborate one. A cheerful goodbye hopefully shows that the system cares about the transaction
Interaction in a Virtual World
Our system will be embedded as an agent called `Karin' in a virtual theatre environment. Users can walk around and preview the stage from different angles. Users can ask Karin about performances and about the theatre building. Virtual worlds invite browsing behaviour. The balance between text, speech, graphics and other interaction modalities in such `leisure' environments is a topic of further research.