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<Paper uid="N03-4005">
  <Title>A Spoken Dialogue Interface to a Geologist's Field Assistant</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The Geologist's Field Assistant is one component of Mobile Agents, a NASA project studying technologies, techniques, and work practices for sophisticated human-agent and human-robot cooperation in space and planetary exploration environments, such as the surface of Mars. The evolution, development and evaluation of this project occurs in a series of increasingly complex field tests in Mars analog environments (deserts and artic sites) on Earth.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The Spoken Dialogue component assists an astronaut wearing a space suit while conducting a geological exploration, by tagging samples by spoken discriptions, commanding the taking of pictures, recording descriptive voice annotations, and tracking the associations between these samples, images, and annotations. The assistant will also help track the astronaut's location and progress though the survey, and help track their body exertion level (heart and respiration rate).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The Spoken Dialogue interface is one of several of Mobile Agents, each with different goals and evaluation metrics. Other components include: Brahms work-practice modelling and simulation system (NASA Ames); MEX mobile wireless networking (Ames); robots (Johnson Space Center (JSC) and Georgia Tech); Spacesuits (JSC) Start tracking my g p s coordinates.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Start logging my bio sensors every fifteen seconds.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Where is my my current location? Call this location Asparagus.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Create a new sample bag and label it sample bag three.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Take a voice note Please begin recording voice note now: This sample originated in a dry creek bed. [pause] Would you like to continue recording the voice note? no Voice note has been created.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Associate that voice note with sample bag three.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Play the voice note associated with sample bag three.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9">  and Biomedical sensors (Stanford University); Satellite Internet services (Goddard Space Flight Center); and Geologists (US Geological Survey).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> The primary technical challanges relating to spoken dialogue systems that arise in this project are open-microphone speech recognition and understanding which decides which agent receives, and responds to a particular utterance and space suit noise.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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