People use common ground - "knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions they believe they share"[1] - when they communicate, and grounding to expand their common ground enough to complete the task at hand. This project aims to understand and use the common ground between the user and a natural speech interface and support grounding between the user and the natural speech interface.

As a testbed, we are building a natural speech interface to the 7x11 grid of individually controllable lights in the Berkeley Institute of Design lab.

We are currently running a month long wizard-of-Oz study to understand how residents of the lab refer to the lights, and how they use the lights. The wizard has a web interface that allows her to easily control the intensity of each individual light. The residents of the lab ask her to change the intensity of their lights, and she makes the changes.

[1] Clark, H. Using Language. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

A map of one of the rooms in the Berkeley Institute of Design lab.
Lights that are comonly used together are the same color