An intelligent speech interface for personal assistants applied to knowledge management

Abstract

This paper describes the design of an intelligent speech interface for Personal Assistants applied to knowledge management. We believe that the use of speech facilitates the interaction between human and agent, since the user may speak with the agent using her own terms, increasing the quality of the assistance. One of the difficulties is to handle spoken natural language, understanding its actual context. To do so, we restrict the exchanges to the following Directives Speech Act classes: inform, request, or answer. In addition, for effective knowledge handling, we are using a set of task and domain ontologies, separating domain and task models for reasoning. We present such an architecture in a multi-agent system and apply it to knowledge management. From the user's point of view, the system is a Service Centre and the personal assistant is its Service Provider. As a result of this conversational speech interface, we expect an increase in the quality of assistance and a reduction of the user's cognitive load.