Mostly Passive Information Delivery – a Prototype

Proceedings of the of the EACL 2014 Workshop on Dialogue in Motion (DM), pages 53–57, Gothenburg, Sweden, April 26-30 2014. c⃝2014 Association for Computational Linguistics Mostly Passive Information Delivery – a Prototype J. Vystrˇcil, T. Macek, D. Luksch, M. Labsk´y, L. Kunc, J. Kleindienst, T. Kaˇsparov´a IBM Prague Research and Development Lab V Parku 2294/4, 148 00 Prague 4 Czech Republic {jan vystrcil, tomas macek, david.luksch, martin labsky, ladislav kunc1, jankle, tereza.kasparova}@cz.ibm.com Abstract In this paper we introduce a new UI paradigm that mimics radio broadcast along with a prototype called Radio One. The approach aims to present useful infor- mation from multiple domains to mobile users (e.g. drivers on the go or cell phone users). The information is served in an en- tertaining manner in a mostly passive style – without the user having to ask for it– as in real radio broadcast. The content is gen- erated on the fly by a machine and inte- grates a mix of personal (calendar, emails) and publicly available but customized in- formation (news, weather, POIs). Most of the spoken audio output is machine syn- thesized. The implemented prototype per- mits passive listening as well as interaction using voice commands or buttons. Initial feedback gathered while testing the proto- type while driving indicates good accep- tance of the system and relatively low dis- traction levels. 1 Introduction The main purpose of this paper is to describe a prototype of the Radio One concept. Radio One presents music, news, emails, relevant POI and other information to the user in a mostly passive way, similarly to conventional radios. Users can interract with the system as well using voice com- mands or buttons. The concept was refined and initially tested with prerecorded audio-visual sce- narios using the Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) technique (Macek et al., 2013). Here we describe the early prototype implemen- tation of the system and summarize initial feed- back collected during informal testing. 2 Related Work Applications that produce customized audio streams can be found in many online music deliv- ery services including Spotify, Pandora, or iTunes. While the above services often focus on music only, other providers (BBC, CNN) publish their spoken content in the form of podcasts. Spoken audio used for podcasts is often recorded by pro- fessional speakers as opposed to the concept pre- sented here. The Aha radio (Aha, 2014) provides various thematic streams of information including music, news, social network updates or Points of Interest (POI). Content can be selected manually by switching between channels. Similar strategies are utilized by Stitcher (Stitcher, 2014) and other services. The concept presented here attempts in- sted to preselect the content automatically and on the fly while preserving the option to request the content explicitely. Many in-car infotainment systems adopted the use of voice control and utilize information di- rectly from on-line services; e.g. (BMW, 2014) and (Ford, 2014). All of the abovementioned ap- plications use mobile data connection to deliver audio stream (as opposed to text) to the user. This can lead …

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