LIA: A Virtual Assistant that Can Be Taught New Commands by Speech

In the imminent future, people are likely to engage with smart devices by instructing them in natural language. A fundamental question to ask is how might intelligent agents interpret such instructions and learn new tasks. In this article we present the first speech-based virtual assistant that can be taught new commands by speech. A user study on our agent has shown that people can teach it new commands. We also show that people see great advantage in using an instructable agent, and determine what users believe are the most important use cases of such an agent.