Design of a competition specifically for spoken dialogue with a humanoid robot

Abstract

Many dialogue system competitions have been held on, but no competition has been organized specifically for spoken dialogue with humanoid robots. As the first ever such attempt in the world, we held a dialogue robot competition. To explore the advantages of a spoken dialogue system using a robot, the competition was designed for contestants to compete with their systems' performance of service operations during a task requiring effective physical motions such as facial expressions and body movements. In the task, the robot recommends sightseeing spots near a particular location and is required to use language, gestures, and other multimodal behaviors to interest the user in the recommended sites. The first and second competitions were held in 2020 and 2022, respectively. This paper provides an overview of this competition and the insights and limitations in designing the competition for dialogue robots while introducing the interactive robot technologies proposed for the dialogue robot.