Companions Project
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| COMPANIONS | |
| Intelligent, Persistent, Personalised Multimodal Interfaces | |
| Image:CompanionsLogoSmall.png | |
| Keywords | dialog system, natural language processing, speech recognition, speech synthesis,embodied agent, emotion, interaction design, machine learning |
|---|---|
| Funding agency | European Union, FP6 |
| Project type | Integrated project |
| Reference | IST-034434 |
| Objective | to make human interfaces more human like by developing a persistent 'Companion' |
| Participants |
|
| Budget | Overall: 12.9 M€ Funding: 9 M€ |
| Duration | 1 November 2006 - 21 October 2009 |
| Web site | http://www.companions-project.org |
COMPANIONS (Intelligent, Persistent, Personalised Multimodal Interfaces) is a European research project funded under the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission and carried out by 15 academic and commercial partners from seven European countries and the United States.[1]
COMPANIONS is an interdisciplinary research project which focuses on combining advanced technologies to create personal, persistent 'agents' or 'Companions'. This will be an agent or 'presence' that stays with the user for long periods of time, developing a relationship and 'knowing' its owners preferences and wishes. It will communicate with the user primarily by using and understanding speech, but also using other technologies such as touch screens and sensors.
COMPANIONS aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing a virtual conversational 'Companion'. This will be an agent or 'presence' that stays with the user for long periods of time, developing a relationship and 'knowing' its owners preferences and wishes. It will communicate with the user primarily by using and understanding speech, but also using other technologies such as touch screens and sensors.
The project is led by Professor Yorick Wilks of the University of Sheffield and consists of a consortium of 15 partners from across Europe and the US. Companions research brings together experts in a range of cutting edge technologies including dialogue management, speech recognition and synthesis, embodied conversational agents, and human-computer interaction. The project's web page (below) includes YouTube clips of the current prototypes after 18 months: the Senior Companion designed to chat to older people about their images on the web and elicit life information from them; the second is the Health and Fitness Companions designed to assist with life style and diet and currently embodied in the Nabaztag plastic rabbit. The project assumes that all personal information will soon be held as texts/images/movies on the web, so the Companion can be seen as a very high-level Internet interface to enable people to manage information about their lives, and to build a coherent narrative of their lives that relatives and friends can have access to later.
In addition to research activity, Companions has an important role in training a new generation of researchers in these interdisciplinary fields, and in raising awareness about persistent agents and the role they can play in society and people's lives. It can be seen as part of the Memories for Life movement.
[edit] References
- ^ COMPANIONS: persistent multi-modal interfaces to the Internet. Retrieved on 2008-05-24.
