Home butler creating a virtual home assistant

Abstract

Virtual butlers, or virtual companions, try to imitate the behaviour of human beings in a believable way. They interact with the user through speech, understand spoken requests, are able to converse with the user, and show some form of emotion and personality. Virtual companions are also able to remember past conversations, and build some sensible knowledge about the user. One major problem with virtual companions is the need to manually create dialogues. We shall introduce a system which automatically creates dialogues using television series scripts. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.