Spoken dialog researchers have recently demonstrated highly-interactive systems in several domains. This paper considers how to build on these advances to make systems more robust, easier to develop, and more scientifically significant. We identify key challenges whose solution would lead to improvements in dialog systems and beyond.

Research systems are providing a vision of what is possible. However much work remains before such abilities are robust, widely useful, and generally available. This article identifies 10 key challenges, relating to modeling, systems architecture, and development methods. Of pressing importance for dialogue systems, these challenges are also relevant for intelligent and interactive systems more generally. Given Siri's broad deployment and popular example in science fiction movies. However, tellingly, salience, one might imagine that it solved the problems such systems are portrayed as idiot savants: knowledgeable, of interacting in dialogue: we often meet people logical, and well-spoken, but unable to who are unaware how cleverly Siri and her sisters interact smoothly with humans. We find it provocative avoid dialogue.

In this paper we assess our progress toward creating a virtual human negotiation agent with fluid turn-taking skills. To facilitate the design of this agent, we have collected a corpus of human-human negotiation roleplays as well as a corpus of Wizard-controlled human-agent negotiations in the same roleplay scenario. We compare the natural turn-taking behavior in our human-human corpus with that achieved in our Wizard-of-Oz corpus, and quantify our virtual human's turn-taking skills using a combination of subjective and objective metrics. We also discuss our design for a Wizard user interface to support real-time control of the virtual human's turn-taking and dialogue behavior, and analyze our wizard's usage of this interface.

We present the SimSensei system, a fully automatic virtual agent that conducts interviews to assess indicators of psychological distress. We emphasize on the perception part of the system, a multimodal framework which captures and analyzes user state for both behavioral understanding and interactional purposes.

This demonstration showcases a virtual agent, Mr. Clue, capable of acting in the role of clue-giver in a word-guessing game. The agent has the ability to automatically generate clues and update its dialogue policy dynamically based on user input.