Introduction to the Special Issue on Dialogue with Robots

This special issue of AI Magazine on dialogue with robots brings together a collection of articles on situated dialogue. The contributing authors have been working in interrelated fields of human-robot interaction, dialogue systems, virtual agents, and other related areas and address core concepts in spoken dialogue with embodied robots or agents. Several of the contributors participated in the AAAI Fall Symposium on Dialog with Robots, held in November 2010, and several articles in this issue are extensions of work presented there. The articles in this collection address diverse aspects of dialogue with robots, but are unified in addressing opportunities with spoken language interaction, physical embodiment, and enriched representations of context. Research on computational models and mechanisms for supporting spoken dialogue dates back to the earliest days of AI research, including Alan Turing's reflection about how machine intelligence could be evaluated.