Designing an Affective Interface for a Personal Digital Assistant

Alok Debnath

Abstract: Integrating emotional understanding and empathetic response have become important for improving the naturalness of general purpose dialogue agents. With the aim of using dialogue systems as a way to interface with a personal digital assistant (PDA), the focus on empathy evolves over time, with the agent expected to maintain a memory of the user's state and their general emotion on a range of topics from previous interactions. Therefore, the goal of dialogue agents for PDAs is to be both empathetic and proactive in their use of prior information about the user, i.e. interact with compassion. This paper aims to lay the foundations, detail the key research questions, and present hypotheses aimed towards the design and architecture of an affective interface for a compassionate PDA.