Face-to-face conversation

Face-to-face conversation is the basic-and richest-form of human communication. While modern conversational user interfaces are increasingly able to incorporate more and more features of face-to-face conversation, including unrestricted verbal communication and continuous social coordination among the participants, most systems do not take full advantage of the interaction possibilities provided by multimodal, embodied, non-verbal communication. In this position paper, we discuss how this limitation affects the possible applications of conversational user interfaces, and describe how current research in embodied communication and social robotics has the potential to address this limitation, with possible benefits to both research communities.