Evaluation of a semi-autonomous attentive listening system with takeover
  prompting
Haruki Kawai Divesh Lala Koji Inoue Keiko Ochi Tatsuya Kawahara
The handling of communication breakdowns and loss of engagement is an
important aspect of spoken dialogue systems, particularly for chatting systems
such as attentive listening, where the user is mostly speaking. We presume that
a human is best equipped to handle this task and rescue the flow of
conversation. To this end, we propose a semi-autonomous system, where a remote
operator can take control of an autonomous attentive listening system in
real-time. In order to make human intervention easy and consistent, we
introduce automatic detection of low interest and engagement to provide
explicit takeover prompts to the remote operator. We implement this
semi-autonomous system which detects takeover points for the operator and
compare it to fully tele-operated and fully autonomous attentive listening
systems. We find that the semi-autonomous system is generally perceived more
positively than the autonomous system. The results suggest that identifying
points of conversation when the user starts to lose interest may help us
improve a fully autonomous dialogue system.