Holistic Conversational Assistants

Context-Aware Conversational Developer Assistants

Building and maintaining modern software systems requires developers to perform a variety of tasks that span various tools and information sources. The crosscutting nature of these development tasks requires developers to maintain complex mental models and forces them (a) to manually split their high-level tasks into low-level commands that are supported by the various tools, and (b) to (re)est...

Grounded Situation Models for Situated Conversational Assistants

A Situated Conversational Assistant (SCA) is a system with sensing, acting and speech synthesis/recognition abilities, which engages in physically situated natural language conversation with human partners and assists them in carrying out tasks. This thesis addresses some prerequisites towards an ideal truly cooperative SCA through the development of a computational model of embodied, situated ...

Grounded Situation Models for Embodied Conversational Assistants

Exploring the Role of Conversational Cues in Guided Task Support with Virtual Assistants

Voice-based conversational assistants are growing in popularity on ubiquitous mobile and stationary devices. Cortana, as well as Google Home, Amazon Echo, and others, can provide support for various tasks from managing reminders to booking a hotel. However, with few exceptions, user input is limited to explicit queries or commands. In this work, we explore the role of implicit conversational cu...

The Future of Spoken Dialogue Systems is in their Past: Long-Term Adaptive, Conversational Assistants

A sketch of dialogue systems as long-term adaptive, conversational agents.