# From Commands to Goal-based Dialogs: A Roadmap to Achieve Natural Language Interaction in RoboCup@Home

## TL;DR

This paper reviews progress and challenges in speech and language understanding for domestic robots in RoboCup@Home, proposing a roadmap to guide future research in goal-based natural language interaction.

## Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive roadmap for advancing natural language understanding in service robots, addressing long-term evaluation and research directions.

## Key findings

- Progress in speech recognition and understanding in RoboCup@Home
- Identification of key challenges in spoken human-robot interaction
- Proposal of a structured research roadmap

## Abstract

On the one hand, speech is a key aspect to people's communication. On the other, it is widely acknowledged that language proficiency is related to intelligence. Therefore, intelligent robots should be able to understand, at least, people's orders within their application domain. These insights are not new in RoboCup@Home, but we lack of a long-term plan to evaluate this approach. In this paper we conduct a brief review of the achievements on automated speech recognition and natural language understanding in RoboCup@Home. Furthermore, we discuss main challenges to tackle in spoken human-robot interaction within the scope of this competition. Finally, we contribute by presenting a pipelined road map to engender research in the area of natural language understanding applied to domestic service robotics.