Voice interaction apparatus and voice interaction method

A voice interaction apparatus configured to have a conversation with a user by using a voice, comprising:

• a speech acquisition unit configured to acquire user speech, the user speech being speech given by the user;
• a syntactic analysis unit configured to perform a syntactic analysis for linguistic information on the acquired user speech;
• a response generation unit configured to generate a response according to the user speech;
• a voice output unit configured to output a voice corresponding to the generated response for the user;
• a non-linguistic information analysis unit configured to analyze non-linguistic information for the acquired user speech, the non-linguistic information being different from the linguistic information and including at least one of prosodic information on the user speech and history information about a response generated by the response generation unit;
• and
• a topic continuation determination unit configured to determine whether or not a topic of a current conversation should be continued according to a non-linguistic information analysis result, the non-linguistic information analysis result being a result of an analysis by the non-linguistic information analysis unit, wherein
• the response generation unit generates a response according to a result of a determination by the topic continuation determination unit.