Connecting Humans with Humans: Multimodal, Multilingual, Multiparty Mediation
Alexander H. Waibel · 2019
Behind much of my research work over 4 decades has been the simple observation that people like people and love interacting with other people more than they like interacting with machines. Technologies that truly support such social desires are more likely to be adopted broadly. Consider email, texting, chat rooms, social media, video conferencing, the internet, speech translation, even videogames with a social element (e.g., Fortnite): we enjoy the technology whenever it brings us closer to our fellow humans, instead of imposing attention-grabbing clutter. If so, how then can we build better technologies that improve, encourage, support human-human interaction? In this talk, I will recount my own story along this journey. When I began, building technologies for the human-human experience, presented formidable challenges: Computer interfaces would need to anticipate and understand the way humans interact, but in 1976, a typical computer had only two instructions to interact with humans: character-in & character-out, and both only supported human-computer interaction. Over the decades that followed, we began to develop interfaces that can process the various modalities of human communication and we built systems that used several modalities in services to improve human-human interaction. These included: