You Don’t Need to Speak, You Need to Listen: Robot Interaction and Human-Like Turn-Taking

The focus on one-to-one speak/wait conversational interaction with artificial system is partly misguided and partly cynical. Misguided because it pre-supposes that our relationship with such a system should be one-to-one and that human-like turn taking is never required. Cynical because we avoid the difficult challenge of building complex systems with a problematic route for publication. Whereas vision systems are regularly used in social robots and virtual agents to detect multiple dialogue partners and aid diarization, speech analysis and human-like turn-taking has lagged far behind. In this positional paper we make the case for focusing on human-like turn taking and multi-party interaction, discuss why realtime speech analysis and conversational management has been neglected, and put forward a program to correct this.