Patent ID: 7412382

Claim:
A voice interactive system, comprising: an acoustic processing part performing acoustic signal processing with respect to an input voice signal; a voice recognizing part recognizing contents of a voice contained in the voice signal after being subjected to the acoustic signal processing; a voice interacting part transmitting information to a user through a voice output or a combination of the voice output and another information transmission unit based on the contents of the voice; and a barge-in control part having a barge-in function of suspending transmission of information by an input or an output of the acoustic processing part or an input signal from an external input in the course of transmission of information, wherein: the barge-in control part detects one or more feature values from an input or an output of the acoustic processing part, or an input signal from the external input, and determines whether or not the barge-in function is set to be effective based on the one or more feature values, the one or more feature values including positional information of the user detected from the input signal from the external input, and the barge-in control part calculates an environment evaluation value of a position of the user by comparing the position of the user with previously recorded map information that represents noise levels in a plurality of areas, and determines the barge-in function to be non-effective in a case where the environment evaluation value exceeds a predetermined threshold value.