As modeling and simulation continue to expand their roles in training environments, the need for intelligent, automated entities expands. By incorporating increasingly intelligent constructive entities, training exercises can increase in fidelity and complexity, without increasing the manpower costs associated with human operators. However, in order to fulfill the same roles that human operators play in training exercises, autonomous entities need to be able to interact with other entities (both autonomous and human-controlled) in a realistic and robust manner.

A critical aspect of this interaction involves entities being able to communicate with humans (and each other) in a way that closely parallels the types of communication which take place amongst humans playing the same roles. In this paper, we present work conducted under the Office of Naval Research which enables robust communication between autonomous entities and human users through natural means such as verbal conversation. Additionally, we present a framework which enables a subject matter expert (SME) to define and expand the communications employed by autonomous entities, without requiring the user to be aware of software engineering, programming, or artificial intelligence concepts underlying the implementation.

This framework, called the Customizable Speech Center (CSC), consists of a graphical, modular architecture for defining concepts about which entities can communicate. The CSC allows human users to easily expand the communication capabilities of autonomous entities, as well as integrate these capabilities into the larger behavior models used during training exercises. This incorporation of robust communication into the behavior models enables extremely dynamic constructive entities capable of adapting to situations in a more realistic and human-like manner. Not only does this present the opportunity to reduce instructor workload by allowing them to give voice commands to autonomous entities, but this also enables the training of users in the often complex aspects of team coordination and communication.