ARIAValuspa at the DRONGO festival

Last weekend (September 29-30) the DRONGO language festival was held in Utrecht, The Netherlands (https://www.drongotalenfestival.nl/). It’s a Belgian/Dutch festival that has everything to do with language, from bilingualism to dialects, from language learning to spoken dialogue systems. It’s meant for all sorts of people, researchers, employees involved with language and hobbyists who work with languages. The University of Twente was also present at this festival, with three demos to show, of which one was the ARIA VALUSPA Platform (AVP). We showed our virtual agent Alice to the public, in the wild. We were a bit worried if the system would survive a whole day in such a busy place and fortunately it did! Despite the noise and many people in the room, several visitors held some decent and interesting conversations with Alice. Visitors could ask questions about Wonderland or listen to Alice cracking some jokes and commenting on their reaction. It was a great way to show our platform to a broader audience. Alice did an amazing job and we’re looking forward on show-casing more capabilities in the future.

Leave a Reply