@inproceedings{esteve-etal-2026-towards,
    title = "Towards a proactive cooking companion for the elderly",
    author = "Esteve, Katarina  and
      Fredriksson, Morgan  and
      Gustafson, Joakim  and
      Kontogiorgos, Dimosthenis  and
      Mashiyi-Veikkola, Timo",
    editor = "Riccardi, Giuseppe  and
      Mousavi, Seyed Mahed  and
      Torres, Maria Ines  and
      Yoshino, Koichiro  and
      Callejas, Zoraida  and
      Chowdhury, Shammur Absar  and
      Chen, Yun-Nung  and
      Bechet, Frederic  and
      Gustafson, Joakim  and
      Damnati, G{\'e}raldine  and
      Papangelis, Alex  and
      D{'}Haro, Luis Fernando  and
      Mendon{\c{c}}a, John  and
      Bernardi, Raffaella  and
      Hakkani-Tur, Dilek  and
      Di Fabbrizio, Giuseppe {''}Pino{''}  and
      Kawahara, Tatsuya  and
      Alam, Firoj  and
      Tur, Gokhan  and
      Johnston, Michael",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology",
    month = feb,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Trento, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/dashboard-stats/2026.iwsds-1.15/",
    pages = "134--141",
    abstract = "Aging-in-place policies leave elderly populations vulnerable to declining nutrition and social isolation. This paper presents a voice-based cooking assistant designed as a companion, addressing both nutritional and social needs through intelligent kitchen interaction. Through {W}o{Z} experiments, we validated: social dialogue serves functional purposes, where ``chatty'' assistants transform cooking pauses into engaging interactions while instructional-only versions create frustrating dead air, despite identical timing."
}