Initiative
There is a systematic ambiguity with this word in voice-interface design.
- the first utterance of a dialog pair; for instance, a question that puts "reactive pressure" on the following utterance to be an answer in response.
- the flow-control of a dialogue. Whichever agent has control of the conversational flow has initiative.
Note that initiative is not just who is talking. Ina an interview, for instance, the interviewer usually maintains initiative. While both parties speak regularly, and the interviewee often speaks for longer duration, the interviewer controls the flows by setting the agenda, asking the questions, requesting elaborations, and so on.
Speech systems can be fixed-initiative, in which one agent maintains all the control, or mixed-initiative, in which either agent can take control at any time.
Initiative manager is a software module in some voice-interface designs that weights the initiative toward the system ore the user depending on the state of repair, the experience of the user, the requirements of interaction script, and the need for specific dialogue management acts. [1]
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A directed dialogue is a fixed-initiative dialogue fixed on the system.[2]
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The system initiates, and closely directs, all interaction. Most systems deployed thus far used a directed-dialog strategy. A directed dialog fora travel planning might sound like this:
System: What's the departure city?
Caller: Um, San Francisco
System: And the arrival city?
Caller: I wanna go to New York
System Ok, what day you are living?
Caller: Next Tuesday
System: Great. And what time do you want to go?
Caller: Sometime after ten a.m.
This directed-dialog is an example of form-filling. The caller is asked a series of directed questions as is the caller were filling out a form.
With a mixed-initiative dialog strategy, the same travel dialog might allow callers more flexibility in what they can say. First the initiative come from the caller. Depending on the caller's response, the system may then take initiative and prompt for missing information:
System: What are travel plans?
Caller: I wanna go to New York next Tuesday morning.
System: Ok, and what's the departure city?
In this second example, the caller provides several pieces of information for the trip, and then the system takes the initiative and prompts for the rest. All mixed-initiative dialogs need to include back-off strategies to capture missing pieces of information.[3]
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In a human-machine interaction, mixed-initiative could be also considered as an alternation of flow-control initiative during time. By example let's consider an home automation voice assistant. The initiative could be triggered by a question or command that user ask to the conversational system. Say "what's the weather today?", this trigger a turn-taking directed-dialogue initiated by a user request (reactive-mode/pull-mode).
Also, the system could be initiate a conversation with the user, by example when some relevant event happens, say some input sensors (light sensor) detect it's too dark. In this case the system could ask the user "do yo want I turn on the light?". In this case is the system that initiate a conversation session (proactive-mode/push mode).