Man–Machine Dialogue Fields - Man-Machine Dialogue: Design and Challenges - page 45

challenges of current MMD system, and especially open-domain systems, is
to use the Web's resources in real time.
2.3.2. Man-machine interfaces, plastic interfaces and ergonomics
ECA, robot companions and voice-activated MMI explore new ways to
interact with a machine, which are not solely based on language. The visual
or sound-based transmission of emotions plays an important role in ECA, for
example. As for the MMI on which a voice-activated module was grafted,
they are usable with the traditional means of menus, keys, cursors and other
graphical metaphors. Voice-based interaction and traditional interaction can
thus mix and make the interaction management and dialogue management
more complicated. For example, does a cancellation command cover the last
action carried out or the last action carried out with the same means of
interaction? This is the type of question asked with the integration of voice
command to our cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDA). Moreover,
and this is also a field of research that is involved at the moment, going from a
desktop computer to a laptop through a PDA raises the question of the
adaptation of the MMI to size constraints and of the use of hardware on which
it is run. For the user to be able to switch hardware transparently, plastic
interfaces have to be designed, i.e. real-time adaptive interfaces which will
not stop the application from running. The issue is particularly significant
when voice-activated interaction and even multimodal activation are involved
[KOL 10, Chapter 9]. In this case again, it is a challenge for the future MMD
systems.
2.4. Conclusion
To design a system able to interact in a realistic manner with a human user,
one approach is to take inspiration from human operations, and thus linguistics
when it comes to language use, cognitive psychology for the perception or
attention aspects, and in general, cognitive sciences. Whether we are trying
to simulate a human communicating mechanism, to simplify it to specify a
computer module either able to approach it or take inspiration from it, there are
various scientific fields involved. This chapter has given us details of some of
thesecontributions, andfinishedwithallthecomputersciencefieldsconcerned
with the design of a dialogue system, fields that are becoming increasingly
numerous.