Towards a natural interaction concept for SUI in AAL

One of the important requirements for the user interaction in the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environment is to be intuitive and natural. This contributes to their acceptance especially for elderly users. Providing intelligent Speech User Interfaces (SUI) is one solution, since voice is a natural way of communication. However a proper interaction concept for SUI has not yet been defined. In this paper, we propose a concept based on two aspects: 1) Dialog initiation and control based on the shopping metaphor. This means that the system should be proactive but still leave the dialog control to the user. 2) Designing voice dialogs by reducing user input but maximizing system output. We also define canonical tasks and introduce a unified digital interaction interface to simplify dialog descriptions and interaction with heterogeneous devices in AAL.