FAME (Facilitating Agent for Multicultural Exchange)

Advances in IT are making possible new tools for human-human communication. Integration of speech, vision and dialog offers the possibility of a new class of tools to aid communication between people from different cultures using different languages.
The project addressed the problem of integrating multiple communications modalities blending the physical and virtual worlds to provide support for multicultural communication and problem solving. The major challenges was automatic perception of human action and understanding of human free dialog between people from different cultures. The consortium constructed an information butler, which demonstrated context awareness in a problem-solving scenario using computer vision, speech and dialog modelling.