DesertWoZ: A Wizard of Oz Environment to Support the Design of Collaborative Conversational Agents

Abstract

The use of conversational agents to support team-based training in virtual environments is a nascent area of research within the Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) and Conversational User Interface (CUI) communities. To support this research, we developed a Wizard of Oz (WoZ) system enabling experimenters to play the role of the conversational agent who must work with a team of three human participants to herd together a group of autonomous robots (target agents) within a virtual task environment. The experimenter can select from one of several tailored responses. The aim of this environment is to determine whether the identified responses facilitate effective team performance and to collect training data to build a conversational agent capable of engaging in team based virtual learning environments.