Dialogue with Robots: Proposals for Broadening Participation and Research in the SLIVAR Community
This work targets researchers in the SLIVAR community to broaden participation and standardize efforts in human-robot spoken interaction, but it is incremental as it offers proposals rather than new technical solutions.
The paper addresses the need to advance spoken dialogue with robots by proposing three community-focused initiatives for education, benchmarks, and language modeling, aiming to guide future research and development in this field.
The ability to interact with machines using natural human language is becoming not just commonplace, but expected. The next step is not just text interfaces, but speech interfaces and not just with computers, but with all machines including robots. In this paper, we chronicle the recent history of this growing field of spoken dialogue with robots and offer the community three proposals, the first focused on education, the second on benchmarks, and the third on the modeling of language when it comes to spoken interaction with robots. The three proposals should act as white papers for any researcher to take and build upon.