EAGER: The REAL Challenge

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The speech and spoken dialog communities watched with interest as the world discovered Apple's SIRI. One of the first applications of an advanced spoken dialog system to a real world problem, it captured the imagination of potential users; the idea of speaking to an object to obtain information or direct an action has entered into the public mind, and the possibilities seem endless. Yet despite the potential advantages, academia has so far created few spoken dialog systems that serve real users and real applications. In the first three years of being open to the research community, the Let's Go system developed by the PI and her team was used for over 150 publications, including 18 theses outside of its host institution. The speech and spoken dialog communities clearly need more real world systems that furnish data, free architectures and research platforms. The PI's goal in this project is to foster such new real world systems, which will give the speech and spoken dialog communities steady streams of data as well as research platforms that they can use to run studies. The project will engage seasoned researchers (who know what will work and what will not), along with high school and undergraduate students (whose younger minds are free to imagine what speech applications can become, uninfluenced by research results or funding concerns), in an effort to find the next great speech applications. Broader Impacts: The REAL Challenge will be the spark that ignites the creation of novel real speech applications. The project will address a broad range of students and invigorate research in a way that can be used in other areas of natural language research. It will inspire a new generation of researchers and provide a unique opportunity for young students to work with seasoned researchers. The novel applications that will be found will ultimately be of help to the general public, whether it be for better access to information, for interaction with a robotic helpmate, or perhaps for a new way of communicating with others using social networks.