Aiming for natural spoken dialogue between machines and humans

Kitaoka Norihide

Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Nowadays, speech recognition technology is used in devices such as smartphones and smart speakers for a variety of purposes in work and daily life. Nevertheless, there are still limitations to its capabilities, in particular when attempting to create natural dialogue with humans. To fill this gap, Professor Norihide Kitaoka has been researching ways to enable spoken dialogue systems to be "usable" in a wide range of scenarios. The key to natural dialogue, he says, lies not only in giving computers the necessary knowledge for conversation, but also in teaching them how to realize human-like responses, such as the timing of utterances and conversational signals.

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