Animated Agents Capable of Understanding Natural Language and Performing Actions

This chapter describes a system called Kairai and its Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities. It identifies its strength and shortcomings and identifies requirements for future NLU systems. The NLU research environment has changed drastically in the past two decades. Better technologies in speech recognition, natural language processing, and computer graphics are now available and make it much easier to develop a life-like animated agent (a software robot) which can understand commands in spoken language and perform actions specified by the commands. Combining these technologies, a life-like animated agent system named Kairai was developed at our laboratory to conduct preliminary research on an NLU system. Although Kairai includes many innovative features, several important problems hindering the building of a better NLU system still remain. After describing several issues the Kairai system can handle, we will conclude by outlining what problems we have to solve in the future. The results obtained from our research should be naturally applicable to hardware robots.