An information retrieval system for supporting casual conversation in wearable computing environments

In the future, wearable computers are going to be exploited for different applications to support human life. In this paper, we present a new wearable computing system that supports daily conversation based on speech recognition and information retrieval technologies. In daily conversation, sometimes we do not know the meaning of a new word or we want to know more information about a topic. In such cases, we can get more information to make our conversation more interesting and fluent by receiving auxiliary information from a wearable computer. The proposed system analyzes conversation content and retrieves information related to ongoing conversations from the Internet to make them more interesting and beneficial. We have implemented a prototype system, and the results of actual use have shown the need for such a system.