In conversational Human-Robot Interaction, robots typically remain silent during user speech and reply only after a pause, making interaction feel unnatural. In contrast, humans signal that they listen through active behavior. To overcome this, we present a system in which a social robot conveys active listening through non-verbal backchannels grounded in interactional intents. The system combines two ideas: (i) a dual-stage framework separating the user’s communicative intent (Speaker Intent) from the robot’s interactional stance (Listener Intent), mapping the latter to non-verbal reactions; and (ii) a parallel pipeline whose chunk-level branch generates non-verbal feedback during speech while a turn-level branch produces the verbal reply at turn end. We deployed this system on a robot and conducted a usability study (N = 6) in a hotel-negotiation task. We found that participants considered the system usable and could interpret gestures. We contribute a ready-to-deploy intent-aware system to enable active listening for robots.
Yang Sun, Jan Leusmann, Michael A. Hedderich· Message Understanding Confer...· 0 citations
Proactivity has become a central concept in research on conversational user interfaces and human–computer interaction. It is an evolutionary stage for conversational agents. Nevertheless, despite the growing research on this topic, the term remains conceptually underspecified and inconsistently applied. Systems that send reminders or recommend content are often labeled as proactive, even when their underlying mechanisms and intentions differ fundamentally. This provocation argues that current uses of the term proactivity in the context of conversational AI are overly broad and conceptually imprecise, which limits our ability to design, compare, and evaluate proactive conversational agents. We synthesize perspectives from human-computer interaction, sociology, and psychology to propose a principled definition and a conceptual framework for proactive conversational agents to distinguish proactive from reactive and other related system behaviors.
Matthias Kraus, Sebastian Zepf, Jan Leusmann et al.· International Conference on...· 0 citations
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