Developing a Generic Focus Modality for Multimodal Interactive Environments

In human communication we need to establish the target of our message and understand if someone is addressing us. Such mechanisms facilitate communication in environments where several potential interlocutors exist. With the advances of speech technologies supporting interaction with computers, the establishment of a device as an interlocutor has often been performed resorting to wake-up words. While this addresses the issue, it is far from the naturalness and efficiency of what we can accomplish in human-human communication. In this regard, research has considered alternatives, such as the visual focus of attention, but the implementations are often scenario specific and not easily available for a generalized use. In this paper, we argue that the establishment of a machine as an interlocutor, particularly for speech interaction, should consider a wide range of verbal and nonverbal aspects, and we conceptualize and present a first proof-of-concept of its integration as a core feature in a multimodal interactive framework.