A conversational dialogue manager for the humanoid robot ERICA Pierrick Milhorat, Divesh Lala, Koji Inoue, Tianyu Zhao, Masanari Ishida, Katsuya Takanashi, Shizuka Nakamura and Tatsuya Kawahara Abstract We present a dialog system for a conversational robot, Erica. Our goal is for Erica to engage in more human-like conversation, rather than being a sim- ple question-answering robot. Our dialogue manager integrates question-answering with a statement response component which generates dialog by asking about fo- cused words detected in the user’s utterance, and a proactive initiator which gener- ates dialog based on events detected by Erica. We evaluate the statement response component and find that it produces coherent responses to a majority of user utter- ances taken from a human-machine dialog corpus. An initial study with real users also shows that it reduces the number of fallback utterances by half. Our system is beneficial for producing mixed-initiative conversation. 1 Introduction Androids are a form of humanoid robots which are intended to look, move and perceive the world like human beings. Human-machine interaction supported with androids has been studied for some years, with many works gauging user acceptance of tele-operated androids in public places such as outdoor festivals and shopping malls [3, 17]. Relatively few have the ability to hold a multimodal conversation autonomously, one of these being the android Nadine [26]. In this paper, we introduce a dialogue management system for Erica (ERato In- telligent Conversational Android). Erica is a Japanese-speaking android which con- verses with one or more human users. She is able to perceive the environment and users through microphones, video cameras, depth and motion sensors. The design objective is for Erica to maintain an autonomous prolonged conversation on a vari- ety of topics in a human-like manner. An image of Erica is shown in Fig. 1. Kyoto University Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto, Japan e-mail: [milhorat][lala][inoue][zhao][takanasi][shizuka][kawahara] @sap.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp 1