Talking with Robots: Opportunities and Challenges
This work identifies key problems for researchers and developers in robotics and speech technology, but it is incremental as it builds on existing challenges without presenting new solutions.
The paper addresses the challenges in speech-based human-robot interaction, highlighting the gap between rigid spoken dialogue systems and flexible human conversation, and suggests that grounded interaction could provide insights to bridge this gap.
Notwithstanding the tremendous progress that is taking place in spoken language technology, effective speech-based human-robot interaction still raises a number of important challenges. Not only do the fields of robotics and spoken language technology present their own special problems, but their combination raises an additional set of issues. In particular, there is a large gap between the formulaic speech that typifies contemporary spoken dialogue systems and the flexible nature of human-human conversation. It is pointed out that grounded and situated speech-based human-robot interaction may lead to deeper insights into the pragmatics of language usage, thereby overcoming the current `habitability gap'.