CobotDS PHONE TRIAL INFORMATION
INTRODUCTION
Using cobotDS, you will be able to interact with the LambdaMOO environment and users over the phone in many of the same ways you already do when in the MOO itself. You will be able to wave, grin, poke hug, etc. from the phone to a room in general or to a specific user, and LambdaMOO users will be able to pass such emotes to the phone user as well. The phone user will also be able to pass certain (restricted but hopefully sufficient) natural-language utterances to LambdaMOO, and LambdaMOO users will be able to pass arbitrary utterances to the phone user. Additionally, cobotDS will provide a number of informational commands for the phone user that allow them to find out what is going on in LambdaMOO.
Many of the topics described below are described in further detail on the cobotDS web page at cobot.research.att.com.
CALLING COBOT ON THE PHONE
Upon calling cobot, you will be prompted for your user name and password. Please speak your responses to these in a clear and natural manner. When giving your password, please speak each digit individually. Thus, the password 5127 must be spoken "five one two seven". The digit 0 must be pronounced as "zero" and not "oh".
Following a successful login (which is attempted a few times before cobot gives up and ends the call), cobot will prompt you with a greeting confirming your user name, and then ask you what you want to do. At this point you are in the main command loop of cobot.
THE MAIN PHONE COMMAND LOOP
Under normal use, the core of a successful call to cobot will consist of a series of dialogue "turns", alternating between utterances by the phone user and cobot. In a typical turn, the phone user makes a request of some sort to cobot, and in response, cobot confirms the command, and may also provide additional information (such as recent emotes or messages for the phone user from LambdaMOO).
The commands available to the phone user are of the form
(command) [(user name)]
where the command is a required utterance, and the user name argument is optional or absent. The allowed user names are restricted to a small group that is posted on the cobotDS web page. However, the phone user can still emote and speak to the LambdaMOO room in general.
BASIC ACTION COMMANDS
Most verbs from the LambdaMOO social core are currently available as cobot phone commands, for example: blush, bow, cackle, chuckle, comfort,cringe, cry, French, giggle, grin, hug, kiss, laugh, nod, poke, shrug, sigh, smile, smirk, wave, wink, yawn. All accept an optional user name argument.
INFORMATIONAL AND SYSTEM COMMANDS
where and who, which take no arguments, will cause cobot to report to the phone user which room of LambdaMOO cobot currently occupies, and which other LambdaMOO users are also in that room, respectively.
repeat will repeat the last phrase told by cobot to the phone user, with no new input from LambdaMOO.
help will prompt the user on what they would like help on.
summarize will give the phone user a brief summarization of the activities that have been taking place around cobot. summarize has an optional numeric argument (of the form
listen will allow the phone user to listen in on the activities and conversations going on around cobot, with an update given from cobot with each turn of the dialogue system. This will continue until the mute command is given, at which time the responses from cobot return to the standard format. Within the listening activity there are filtering techniques in place that will keep the updates to within a reasonable listening length.
quit will allow you to exit the system.
THE "SAY" COMMAND AND GRAMMARS
When the phone user invokes the say command (by speaking, for example, either say or say Buster or some other user name), cobot will then prompt the user for the message they would like to pass to LambdaMOO. Following this prompt, the user should simply speak the English sentence they would like to convey subject to some important and nontrivial constraints.
All speech recognizers make use of some underlying grammar describing which utterances are "allowed" by the recognizer. For our current purposes we may think of this grammar as simply an exhaustive listing of all those words, phrases and sentences that the recognizer will attempt to recognize. Any utterance not contained in this list should not be expected to be recognized. CobotDS uses several different grammars, each appropriate in different dialogue contexts. Upon issuing the grammar command (no arguments), the user will be prompted as to which grammar they would like to set: cliché, smalltalk, or personal. These are explained below. When a given grammar is active the phone user invoking the "say" command will be able to utter an item in the grammar, whereupon it will (hopefully) be recognized successfully and passed on to LambdaMOO by cobot.
The default grammar is the smalltalk grammar. This will always be active during a say unless another grammar is explicitly set by the phone user via the grammar command. The cliché grammar consists of approximately 3000 common English clichés, sayings and phrases. The smalltalk grammar is meant to provide a more basic and coherent set of useful utterances for common conversation. The smalltalk grammar contains staples such as "How are you", "Hello", "I am fine", "Yes", "I am at home", and many others.
IMPORTANT: The personal grammar will contain phrases that have been provided by the phone users themselves. Each user will have their own personal grammar containing particular phrases that they may want to be able to pass to LambdaMOO using the say command. We will solicit source material for each personal grammar and compile into the necessary form, after which users should be able to pass utterances from the source using the "say" command with active grammar set to personal.
Note that if no personal grammar has been provided, the default personal grammar is identical to the cliche grammar. The use of personal grammars is one of the more interesting research aspects of cobot, and we invite creativity by phone users in choosing their source material.
TUTORIAL
If you would like to try a sample phone call that illustrates most of the above functionality, try this tutorial script.
PRIVACY POLICY
The cobotDS system will of course keep system logs that include your dialogues with the system and the phone number you call from. All of this information will be kept absolutely confidential, and will not be accessible to anyone outside of our small research group of approximately five people, all of who are working on the project. We will not use this information for anything other than debugging and improving the system.
CONTACTING US
We solicit your feedback and suggestions on the use, functionality and design of cobotDS, and invite you to keep in touch with us both in LambdaMOO and via email. We have monitoring tools that will automatically inform us when cobotDS is not working, but if you notice anything especially anomalous, please let us know. The contacts for cobotDS are Charles Isbell (LambdaMOO user HFh, RL email isbell@research.att.com) and Michael Kearns (LambdaMOO user Buster, RL email mkearns@research.att.com).