I Feel You: Towards Affect-Sensitive Domotic Spoken Conversational Agents

We describe the work on infusion of emotion into limitedtask autonomous spoken conversational agents (SCAs) situated in the domestic environment, using aNeed-inspired task-independentEmotion model (NEMO). In order to demonstrate the generation of affect through the use of the model, we describe the work of integrating it with a naturallanguage mixed-initiative HiFi-control SCA. NEMO and the host system communicates externally, removing the need for the Dialog Manager to be modified as done in most existing dialog systems, in order to be adaptive. We also summarize the work on automatic affect prediction, namely frustration and contentment from dialog features, a non-conventional source, in the attempt of moving towards a more user-centric approach.