CityTalk: Robots that talk to tourists and can switch domains during the dialogue

Abstract

The paper describes CityTalk, a spoken dialogue system for Nao robots that provide information for tourists about local hotels, shops and restaurants. An important feature is that the robots switch domains smoothly during the dialogue if the user asks about a new domain, for example talking about hotels using a hotel database and then talking about restaurants using a restaurant database if the user asks about restaurants. CityTalk is the first robot dialogue system to use PyDial, a research toolkit for statistical dialogue systems. A topic tracker detects from user utterances when a domain switch is required. Clarification questions appropriate for different domains are based on domain-specific ontologies. CityTalk includes new domains including Tokyo Waterfront restaurants and hotels.