Realising voice dialogue management in a collaborative virtual environment

The applications of 3D-virtual environments and Voice User Interface (VUI) on personal computers have received significant attention in recent years. Since speech is the most natural way of communication, incorporating VUI into virtual environments can greatly enhance user interaction and immersiveness. Although there have been many researches addressing the issue of integrating VUI and 3D-virtual environment, most of the proposed solutions do not provide an effective mechanism for multiuser dialogue management. The objective of this research is on providing a solution for integrated dialogue management and realising such a mechanism in a collaborative Multi User Virtual Environment (MUVE). We have designed a dialogue scripting language called eXtensible Animation Markup Language – Voice Extension (XAML-V), based on the VoiceXML standard, to address the issues of synchronisation with animation and dialogue management for multiuser interaction. We have also realised such a language on a MUVE to evaluate the effectiveness of this design.