Designing human-machine interactive systems requires cooperation between different disciplines is required. In this work, we present a Dialogue Manager and a Language Generator that are the core modules of a Voice-based Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) capable of carrying out challenging, long and complex coaching conversations. We also develop an efficient integration procedure of the whole system that will act as an intelligent and robust Virtual Coach. The coaching task significantly differs from the classical applications of SDSs, resulting in a much higher degree of complexity and difficulty. The Virtual Coach has been successfully tested and validated in a user study with independent elderly, in three different countries with three different languages and cultures: Spain, France and Norway.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; human–machine interaction; natural language generation; spoken dialogue systems; user study; virtual coaching.