Automated spoken dialogue provides a natural way of communicating with networked home devices. This has applications for the elderly and disabled, but will also have wider
applications as homes become networked as a matter of course, and we become used to services being provided by multiple devices. The D'Homme project addresses the theoretical challenges in language understanding and
dialogue management for controlling and querying multiple networked devices from inside or outside the home, but stops short of issues such as microphone placement or speaker identification (we assume the use of a
mobile phone or a hand held remote controller with integrated microphone).The partners in D'Homme are the Universities of Gothenburg, Edinburgh and Seville, and the companies, SRI, netdecisions and Telia. The partners contributed the following expertise:
- Edinburgh: advanced knowledge representation and reasoning, language engineering.
- Gothenburg: advanced, flexible dialogue, Swedish language.
- Seville: dialogue management and language engineering. Spanish language.
- Telia: advanced dialogue and action management, networking real devices.
- netdecisions: language engineering (grammar based models), English language
- SRI: language engineering (statistical models), project management
Given the exploratory nature of this one year project, and the existence of considerable background at each site, we decided that partners should adapt their own dialogue systems rather than attempting to build a
single new system. However, partners were encouraged to share modules wherever possible, and this has been widespread: partly due to the use of an agreed functional architecture, partly due to different partners
concentrating their efforts on different modules. The results of the project have been considerable in such a small time frame. There have been publications in 6 different refereed workshops/conferences,
and a large number of substantive project reports outlining the project achievements and challenges. The project demonstrators show the feasibility of spoken dialogue for networked devices, and show the directions for
the future. They have had wide visibility, both in presentations to companies and at academic events. The
Audio-Visual presentation gives a less-technical introduction to the project, and short slide shows of some of our demo systems in operation are available:
(Note that the HTML presentations have been generated using Powerpoint and may not work on all versions of all browsers. The Powerpoint presentations all contain audio.)
Overview slides for the project are available in HTML or PDF
.Try the D'Homme demos.
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