Evaluation of a semi-autonomous attentive listening system with takeover prompting

Abstract: 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.