Speech-Based Interaction

Dear Colleagues,

Recent times have seen a tremendous growth in the availability of speech-based interaction with a range of ‘intelligent’ systems. The integration of spoken language technology into smartphones and smart speakers has led to an explosion of voice-based applications. Primarily thanks to advances in deep learning, the performance of the component technologies such as automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis has improved immensely, and this has facilitated the deployment of hugely popular commercial systems such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. Interacting with such voice-enabled personal agents is, however, relatively restricted in comparison with human–human spoken conversation, and much is still to be learnt about how to model and/or implement effective speech-based interaction in a human–machine context. Contemporary interactions tend to be short one-off transactions based on simple question answering or spoken commands—some way short of the rich social and informational exchanges that characterise conversational interaction between human interlocutors. This Special Issue aims to draw together the latest research results in this area, with a particular emphasis on the open challenges facing speech-based interaction between humans and machines.

Potential authors are encouraged to submit original research papers that capture state-of-the-art and emerging approaches in speech-based interaction, position papers that provide theoretical insights and identify critical challenges, and case studies that illustrate the outstanding research issues. Suitable topics include, but are not limited to:

• Conversational user interfaces;
• Multimodal interaction;
• Interaction management (including turn-taking and inter-agent coupling);
• Spoken language dialogue systems;
• Incremental spoken language processing;
• Multi-party spoken interaction;
• Speech-based human–robot/agent interaction;
• Human factors issues (such as anthropomorphism, mismatched agents and usability/habitability);
• Ethical issues (including misrepresentation and bias);
• Human versus machine spoken language capabilities (such as grounding, empathy and theory of mind);
• Sustained versus one-off spoken interactions (including learning and memory);
• Speech-based interaction in real-world environments.

Prof. Dr. Roger K. Moore
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.