Multimodal Dialogue for Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and Smart Environments (SmE) are based on three foundations: ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous communication and intelligent adaptive interfaces [41]. This type of systems consists of a series of interconnected computing and sensing devices which surround the user pervasively in his environment and are invisible to him, providing a service that is dynamically adapted to the interaction context, so that users can naturally interact with the system and thus perceive it as intelligent. To ensure such a natural and intelligent interaction, it is necessary to provide an effective, easy, safe and transparent interaction between the user and the system. With this objective, as an attempt to enhance and ease human-to-computer interaction, in the last years there has been an increasing interest in simulating human-tohuman communication, employing the so-called multimodal dialogue systems [46]. These systems go beyond both the desktop metaphor and the traditional speech-only interfaces by incorporating several communication modalities, such as speech, gaze, gestures or facial expressions. Multimodal dialogue systems offer several advantages. Firstly, they can make use of automatic recognition techniques to sense the environment allowing the user to employ different input modalities, some of these technologies are automatic speech recognition [62], natural language processing [12], face location and tracking [77], gaze tracking [58], lipreading recognition [13], gesture recognition [39], and handwriting recognition [78].