In the game, users describe pictures they see on their computer screen and the agent tries to guess which picture they are talking about as fast and accurately as it can. Using its real-time, "incremental" (word-by-word) speech processing algorithms, the agent's speed of understanding and response is so fast that its game performance rivals that of human-human teams playing the same game.

Credit: David DeVault, USC Institute for Creative Technologies

In a recent research paper, David DeVault and his students Ramesh Manuvinakurike and Maike Paetzel describe the creation and evaluation of a high-performance, game-playing agent called Eve. The research received a Best Paper Award at the 16th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2015) and points the way toward the creation of voice interfaces for other applications that users may find more natural and efficient to use.

Credit: David DeVault, USC Institute for Creative Technologies

David DeVault is a research assistant professor at the USC's Institute for Creative Technologies.

Credit: David DeVault, USC Institute for Creative Technologies