Multimodal Dialogue System for Interaction in AmI Environment by Means of File-Based Services

This paper presents our ongoing work on the development of a multimodal dialogue system to enable user control of home appliances in an ambient intelligence environment. The physical interaction with the appliances is carried out by means of Octopus, a system developed in a previous study to ease communication with hardware devices by abstracting them as network files. To operate the appliances and get information about their state, the dialogue system writes and reads files using WebDAV. This architecture presents an important advantage since the appliances are considered as abstract objects, which notably simplifies dialogue system’s interaction with them.