An intelligent speech interface for personal assistants in R&D projects

Groupware and collaborative tools have been proposed to support cooperative work. However, they suffer from some rather severe limitations. Alternatively, multi-agent systems can be proposed to improve the situation. In the latter case, the user normally interacts with the system through a special agent called a personal assistant. In this paper, we describe the design of an ontology-based speech interface for personal assistants applied in the context of cooperative projects. We believe that this type of interface will improve the quality of assistance and increase collaboration between project members. We present the interface and its insertion into a multi-agent system designed for research and development projects. We describe the design of the interface, highlighting the role of ontologies for semantic interpretation. As a result of this conversational speech interface, we expect an increase in the quality of assistance and a reduction in the time needed to answer user’s requests.