Multimodal open-domain conversations with robotic platforms

Abstract The chapter discusses how to move from closed-domain dialogs to open-domain dialogs, and from speech-based dialogs to multimodal dialogs with speech, gestures, and gaze, using robot agents. We briefly describe the Constructive Dialog Model, the foundation for our work. Management of topic shifts is one of the challenges for open-domain dialogs, and we describe how Wikipedia can be used for topic shifts as well as an open-domain knowledge source. Multimodal issues are illustrated by our multimodal WikiTalk open-domain robot dialog system. Two future research directions are discussed: the use of domain ontologies in dialog systems and the need to integrate robots with the Internet of Things.