GAIML: A New Language for Verbal and Graphical Interaction in Chatbots

One of the aims of the research in the field of the human-computer interaction is the design of a natural and intuitive interaction modalities. In particular, many efforts have been devoted in the development of systems able to interact with the user in natural language. Chatbots are the classical interfaces for natural language interaction. Such systems can be very sophisticated, including support for 3D avatars and speech analysis and synthesis. However, all of them present only a text area allowing the user to input her sentences. No doubt, an interaction involving also the natural language can increase the comfort of the user with respect to common interfaces using only graphical widgets. However, multi-modal communication must be preferred in all those situations when the user and the system have a tight interaction. Typical examples are cultural heritages applications (intelligent museum guides, picture browsing) or systems presenting to the user an information integrated from different sources as in the case of the iGoogle (TM) interface. In this work we present the Graphical Artificial Intelligence Markup Language, an extension of AIML allowing merging of verbal and graphical interaction modalities. A chatbot system, Graphbot, is also presented that is able to support this language. The language is able to define personalized interface patterns that are the most suitable ones in relation to the type of data exchanged between the user and the system during the dialogue.