An Interactive Question-Answer System with Dialogue for a Receptionist Avatar

Nowadays, the communication between human and machines have occurred, at most of the cases, throught text due to the fact the oral communication to involve two main aspects: the understanding of the spoken language and the recognition voice, that are unsolved research topics yet. However, it is notable the progress that the areas of voice recognition and synthetizer have gotten in the last decade and this is turning possible the development of more natural human/machine interfaces. In this direction, this work brings an important contribution for the area of Question Anwering system (QA), specially for the Brazilian Portuguese language, for which, there are few systems of QA. We are proposing an integrated system, that it is a combination of a QA and a dialogue system by using ontology. It can also be considered as an Interactive QA incorporated to a robotic head acting as a receptionist at a given environment. This system can be accessed by everyone from any part of the world and it is being applied to our Institution, providing information about its staff members, professors and events. Furthermore, the system prototype can be extended by other types of applications. Several tests showed a good performance of the proposed system.