David Feilacher David Feilacher Sabine Lehner Sabine Lehner Mario Heller Mario Heller Berhard Girsule Berhard Girsule Andreas Jakl Andreas Jakl St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences With rising life expectancy and seniors seeking to live independently for as long as possible, automated emergency detection and communication will play a vital role in ensuring quick emergency responses in the future. Voice assistants enable a quick and hands-free reaction by the users and can also take their feedback into account. This paper presents the methods employed by the Smart Companion project to improve the dialogue and technical structures of a voice assistant system for emergency situations. We propose a dialogue structure, guided by a user centered design process, that issues concise and closed-ended questions while being able to process a wide range of possible user responses. This structure can handle any verbal user input, including non-responses and unintelligible utterances, through feedback and fallback mechanisms. To avoid technical errors or unresponsive users prematurely terminating an emergency call, conversations can be restarted at any point in the dialogue structure, by working in tandem with the other Smart Companion components. This also enables the emergency system to proactively ascertain if the user needs help. The technical implementation provides an easy dialogue configuration, adaptation, and expansion, with a custom state machine design supervising the dialogue flow. PDFDocument eng 2025-07-09T12:11:25.565980Z Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Media and Communication Sciences ÖFOS 2012 -- SOZIALWISSENSCHAFTEN (5) -- Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften (508) -- Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften (5080) ÖFOS 2012 -- SOCIAL SCIENCES (5) -- Media and Communication Sciences (508) -- Media and Communication Sciences (5080) Informationstechnik Information technology ÖFOS 2012 -- TECHNISCHE WISSENSCHAFTEN (2) -- Elektrotechnik, Elektronik, Informationstechnik (202) -- Elektrotechnik, Elektronik, Informationstechnik (2020) -- Informationstechnik (202022) ÖFOS 2012 -- TECHNICAL SCIENCES (2) -- Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Information Engineering (202) -- Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Information Engineering (2020) -- Information technology (202022) Audiovisuelle Medien Audiovisual media ÖFOS 2012 -- TECHNISCHE WISSENSCHAFTEN (2) -- Elektrotechnik, Elektronik, Informationstechnik (202) -- Elektrotechnik, Elektronik, Informationstechnik (2020) -- Audiovisuelle Medien (202002) ÖFOS 2012 -- TECHNICAL SCIENCES (2) -- Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Information Engineering (202) -- Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Information Engineering (2020) -- Audiovisual media (202002) Kunstwissenschaften Arts ÖFOS 2012 -- GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN (6) -- Kunstwissenschaften (604) -- Kunstwissenschaften (6040) ÖFOS 2012 -- HUMANITIES (6) -- Arts (604) -- Arts (6040) Voice Assistants Human Machine Communication AI Dialogue Design State Machine Design 1283414 b application/pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/