Abstract
This chapter presents a design process for developing a conversational navigation agent for visually impaired pedestrians where communication runs in natural language. This approach brings a lot of new problems with opportunity to solve them in nontraditional ways. The conversation with the agent is an example of a problem-solving process with several complex parts of the solution needed to be executed by the user. The user can ask additional questions about each part of the solution, thus adaptively changing the level of detail of information acquired, or to alternate the whole process to fit user preferences. In this way, the agent can replace a human navigator. Using this design process exemplar, we provide guidance on creating similar conversational agents, which utilize a natural language user interface. The guidance is supported by the results of several experiments conducted with participants with visual impairments.
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Notes
- 1.
Typhlopedy deals with special pedagogical care for people with visual impairments.
- 2.
An screenreader present in all Apple products.
- 3.
IBM Watson Conversation—https://www.ibm.com/watson/services/conversation/.
- 4.
W3C WAI-ARIA—https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/.
- 5.
Naviterier—http://www.naviterier.cz.
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Acknowledgements
This research has been supported by the project Navigation of handicapped people funded by grant no. SGS16/236/OHK3/3T/13 (FIS 161–1611663C000). We want to thank Catholijn M. Jonker, M. Birna van Riemsdijk, Pietro Pasotti and Myrthe Tielman from Interactive Intelligence Group, TU Delft for suggestions and collaboration on the inclusion of alternative routes to our conversational navigation agent.
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Balata, J., Mikovec, Z., Slavik, P. (2018). Conversational Agents for Physical World Navigation. In: Moore, R., Szymanski, M., Arar, R., Ren, GJ. (eds) Studies in Conversational UX Design. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95579-7_4
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