Although Siri can be quite helpful and at times pleasant to communicate with she still lacks the flexibility of a human duologue partner making conversing with her have an unnatural flow. In fact Siri – like other robots – is lacking in her turn taking ability. To communicate somewhat smoothly with robots one needs to…
In most typical dialogue, humans use turntaking naturally – one person waits for a natural break in the other person’s dialogue to start speaking or answering the other. Computers and robots, however, are not great at this – generally, they are actually very bad, as we have all experienced when calling a phone-based automatic speech…
Simple robots operate through a perception-action cycle, or loop, which allows them to make decisions and form a response based on the information they receive on each cycle. Adding layers in a robot’s perception-action cycle enables it to “think outside the loop”, supporting parallel information processing on different levels simultaneously, thus making it generally more…
Ever tried conversing with a robot on the other end of a telephone customer service line? Now try adding a slight delay due to indeterminism and prepare for a frustrating interruption followed by a back and forth between incorrect options, cheerfully pursued by the robot. Our recently-launched project CoCOMaps aims to make robots better at…
Today the CoCoMaps project officially launched! We are very exited to set off on this journey after months of preparation. The aim of the project is to endow robots with the skills to communicate with humans in real time using natural dialogue. If successful these improved communicational skills of the robots will enable much more sophisticated…
The start of the CoCoMaps project on 1 September 2016 is drawing near – here is a link to a great introduction article by IIIM: CoCoMaps – Teaming up with the Robots
A joint proposal by CMLabs and IIIM for the project CoCoMaps has been accepted by the ECHORD++ EU consortium for funding starting from September 2016.