How Was Your Day?

We describe a ‘How was your day?’ (HWYD) Companion whose purpose is to establish a comforting and supportive relationship with a user via a conversation on a variety of work-related topics. The system has several fairly novel features aimed at increasing the naturalness of the interaction: a rapid ‘short loop’ response primed by the results of acoustic emotion analysis, and an ‘interruption manager’, enabling the user to interrupt lengthy or apparently inappropriate system responses, prompting a replanning of behaviour on the part of the system. The ‘long loop’ also takes into account the emotional state of the user, but using more conventional dialogue management and planning techniques. We describe the architecture and components of the implemented prototype HWYD system.