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Usenet - Usenet Newsgroups - Newsgroups - Server Colocation - Music Lyrics Considering the steadily increasing dissemination of computer applications and their growing functional complexity, it is crucially important to avoid that usage and control of these systems and services gets more and more complicated. To this end the utilization of natural language as a means of operation is a logical consequence to facilitate their usage. Thus user-friendly, comfortable and safe vocal interfaces are needed that ensure natural interactivity. VICO - Virtual Intelligent Co-Driver - aims at the development of an intelligent conversational agent enabling ubiquitous natural interaction between humans and digital devices and services. Focusing on the automotive environment, the project will provide a user-friendly natural language interface for in-car devices and innovative services, such as navigation, on-the-fly route planning, interactive hotel and restaurant reservation and tourist information. Built in two stages of development a first prototype of the virtual co-driver will be available first, and at the end of the project a final demonstrator. These prototype demonstrator systems will integrate all approaches developed during the project, and will also be able of fulfilling all features presented below. User evaluations will be conducted in simulated as well as real driving situations all throughout the duration of the project in order to improve the design and usability of the emerging final system. Both activities are foreseen to be able to integrate user feedback into the evolution process as early as possible as well as to ensure acceptance by possible users of a virtual co-driver. Furthermore, the results of these evaluations are a valuable input for further development of future natural language conversational systems in adverse environments. Whereas the overall objective of VICO is the design and development of an intelligent agent providing a conversational speech interface to allow natural interaction between humans and electronic services, the focus is on solving the particular challenges in the automotive environment. Special care is taken to create generic techniques and 80s Music tools extendable to additional functionalities that might even go beyond project activities. Great importance is also attached to developing tools and techniques portable to other domains, like e.g. mobile agents within related applications. To reach these goals significant improvements and extensions of existing echnology are necessary. Given the attentional load of a user driving a vehicle while talking to the virtual intelligent co-driver, the processing of natural speech requires high-performance speech and language processing techniques, and a flexible and adaptive dialogue management. Furthermore, the realization of a dynamic information source. |