How Would Siri, Google Assistant Improve With Better Turntaking?

confusedrobotsAlthough 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 understand how they operate and communicate accordingly with them. One needs to:

  1. Say the wake-up command.
  2. Wait until it claims to be ready.
  3. Now speak a single sentence without any pauses or hesitation.
  4.  If you change your mind half way you MUST finish anyway and start with step 1 again.
  5.  If you change your mind half way you MUST finish anyway and start with step 1 again.
  6. If it misunderstands anything you MUST finish anyway and start with step 1 again.
  7. If it needs clarification you MUST finish anyway and start with step 1 again.
  8.  Whatever you want you must ALWAYS finish anyway and start with step 1 again.

However most people do not understand how robots operate and process information. When ‘the Average Joe’ tries to use our Amazon Echo he wants to be able to:

  • Pause to think about the rest of the sentence
  • Stop and ask someone else ‘what was that artist called again’ before continuing
  • Say “oh no, start again”.
  • Provide more information when what he said wasn’t enough
  • Be able to stop the ranting reply when that wasn’t what he was looking for
  • Ask the robot to repeat the question.

…and many other demands which are completely unreasonable given the ability of Siri. However by improving robot’s turntaking ability these demands might not be so unreasonable in the near future. With improved turntaking robots could processed these interruptions or pauses and it would allow them to give an appropriate response even when interrupted in the middle of a sentence which invariably the general user will continue to do.

The CoCoMaps project proposes to improve the turntaking ability of robots technology which will allow communication between humans and robots to flow much more naturally as described in our last post.

 

 

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