Symbolic conversation modeling as abstract part of the user interface

Abstract

The art of conversation is a well-known interaction type between humans. Human-computer interfaces that follow this metaphor struggle with complex problems of speech understanding, speech generation and intelligent conversational behavior in general. This paper presents an approach that gives a simple, explicit symbolic model of conversation between human and computer to be used by interface designers as an abstract platform of conversational interaction – without being forced to regard the basic implementations of speech systems or graphical anthropomorphic avatars or virtual humans and therefore free from the problems of basic media manipulation.