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 WoZ 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.

Current in-vehicle conversational agents lack awareness of the driving situation, treating all dialogue alike regardless of cognitive demands. This paper presents a modular experimental platform that integrates the CARLA driving simulator with a real-time spatial-reasoning engine to support research on situation-aware dialogue. The system enables Wizard-of-Oz studies in which human operators control conversational agents informed by live spatial-semantic analysis of the traffic environment. As initial validation, a controlled study (n = 10) tested the platform’s sensitivity to conversational load effects, examining whether increasing conversational complexity produces a vanishing point of attention, a threshold where combined conversational and driving demands lead to a non-linear collapse in performance. Results revealed a sharp rise in collisions and missed hazard detections under high cognitive load, confirming the platform’s sensitivity to conversational strain. The platform provides a reproducible testbed for investigating how dialogue timing, content, and environmental demands interact, offering a foundation for designing adaptive, cognitively safe in-vehicle conversational systems.