• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.29-40
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• 2020

Visually impaired people use tactile maps to get spatial information about their surrounding environment, find their way, and improve their independent mobility. However, classical tactile maps that make use of braille to describe the location within the map have several limitations, such as the lack of information due to constraints on space and limited feedback possibilities. This study describes the development of a new multi-modal interactive tactile map interface that addresses the challenges of tactile maps to improve the usability and independence of visually impaired people when using tactile maps. This interface adds touch gesture recognition to the surface of tactile maps and enables the users to verbally interact with a voice agent to receive feedback and information about navigation routes and points of interest. A low-cost prototype was developed to conduct usability tests that evaluated the interface through a survey and interview given to blind participants after using the prototype. The test results show that this interactive tactile map prototype provides improved usability for people over traditional tactile maps that use braille only. Participants reported that it was easier to find the starting point and points of interest they wished to navigate to with the prototype. Also, it improved self-reported independence and confidence compared with traditional tactile maps. Future work includes further development of the mobility solution based on the feedback received and an extensive quantitative study.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.61-74
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• 2020

Voice user interface has become a commercially viable and extensive interaction mechanism with the development of voice assistants. Despite the popularity of voice assistants, the academic community does not utterly understand about what, when, and how users chat with them. Chatting with a voice assistant is crucial as it defines how a user will seek the help of the assistant in the future. This study aims to cover the essence and construct of conversational AI, to develop a classification method to deal with user utterances, and, most importantly, to understand about what, when, and how Chinese users chat with voice assistants. We collected user utterances from the real conventional database of a commercial voice assistant, NetEase Sing in China. We also identified different utterance categories on the basis of previous studies and real usage conditions and annotated the utterances with 17 labels. Furthermore, we found that the three top reasons for the usage of voice assistants in China are the following: (1) greeting, (2) function, and (3) music. Chinese users like to interact with voice assistants at night from 7 PM to 10 PM, and they are polite toward the assistants. The whole percentage of negative feedback utterances is less than 6%, which is considerably low. These findings appear to be useful in voice interaction designs for intelligent hardware.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.8
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• pp.573-585
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• 2018

Services for navigation and entertainment through AI-based voice user interface devices are becoming popular in the connected car system. Given the classification of VUI agent developers as IT companies and automakers, this study explores attributes of agent persona and user experience that impact the driver's perceived safety and satisfaction. Participants of a car simulator experiment performed entertainment and navigation tasks, and evaluated the perceived safety and satisfaction. Results of regression analysis showed that credibility of the agent developer, warmth and attractiveness of agent persona, and efficiency and care of the UX dimension showed significant impact on the perceived safety. The determinants of perceived satisfaction were unity of auto-agent makers and gender as predisposing factors, distance in the agent persona, and convenience, efficiency, ease of use, and care in the UX dimension. The contributions of this study lie in the discovery of the factors required for developing conversational VUI into the autonomous driving environment.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.15 no.7
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• pp.834-839
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• 2005

When a great variety of services become available to user through the broadband convergence network in the ubiquitous home environment, an intelligent agent is required to deal with the complexity of services and perceive intension of a user. Different from the old-fashioned command-based user interface for selecting services, conversation enables flexible and rich interactions between human and agents, but diverse expressions of the user's background and context make conversation hard to implement by using either user-initiative or system-initiative methods. To deal with the ambiguity of diverse expressions between user and agents, we have to apply hierarchial bayesian networks for the mixed initiative conversation. Missing information from user's query is analyzed by hierarchial bayesian networks to inference the user's intension so that can be collected through the agent's query. We have implemented this approach in ubiquitous home environment by implementing simulation program.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.56-61
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• 2022

In this paper, we classify and present AI algorithms and natural language processing methods used in chatbots. A framework that can be used to implement a chatbot is also described. A chatbot is a system with a structure that interprets the input string by constructing the user interface in a conversational manner and selects an appropriate answer to the input string from the learned data and outputs it. However, training is required to generate an appropriate set of answers to a question and hardware with considerable computational power is required. Therefore, there is a limit to the practice of not only developing companies but also students learning AI development. Currently, chatbots are replacing the existing traditional tasks, and a practice course to understand and implement the system is required. RNN and Char-CNN are used to increase the accuracy of answering questions by learning unstructured data by applying technologies such as deep learning beyond the level of responding only to standardized data. In order to implement a chatbot, it is necessary to understand such a theory. In addition, the students presented examples of implementation of the entire system by utilizing the methods that can be used for coding education and the platform where existing developers and students can implement chatbots.