Transferable Multi-modal Dialogue Systems for Interactive Entertainment

We present and demonstrate a dialogue system for multi-modal conversations with autonomous mobile robots, and argue that it could feasibly be used in games where a user controls a variety of NPCi ’bots’. Moreover, the ’phg-and-plsy ’ nature of the system makes it ’transferable ’ in the sense of being portable to conversations with robots which have di/~erent abilities and vocabularies. This modularization of the dialogue manager is achieved via a level of abstraction over robot ’activities’ which allows game developers to use the system with very minimal linguistic knowledge. We illustrate these ideas by demonstrating a dialogue interface to the (simulated) WITAS robot helicopter, UAV (’Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’).2 We argue that this type of system points the way forward in the development of conversational systems in games.