For professional speech researchers, there is a rich technical literature covering many years of primary research in speech. However, this literature is not necessarily applicable to the needs of business people, application developers, and students who are interested in learning about the practical uses of speech technology. On the other hand, while existing introductory resources cover the basic mechanics of development of application development as well as aspects of the voice user interface, they don’t go far enough in dealing with the details that have to be taken into account to make spoken dialog systems successful in practice. What’s missing is information in between the in-depth technical literature and the more introductory development resources. The goal of this book is to provide information for anyone who wants to take the next step beyond the basics of current speech applications but isn’t yet ready to dive into the technical literature. It is hoped that this book will help project managers, application developers, and students gain a fuller and more complete understanding of spoken dialog technology and the practical aspects of developing and deploying spoken dialog applications.

For professional speech researchers, there is a rich technical literature covering many years of primary research in speech. However, this literature is not necessarily applicable to the needs of business people, application developers, and students who are interested in learning about the practical uses of speech technology. On the other hand, while existing introductory resources cover the basic mechanics of development of application development as well as aspects of the voice user interface, they don’t go far enough in dealing with the details that have to be taken into account to make spoken dialog systems successful in practice. What’s missing is information in between the in-depth technical literature and the more introductory development resources. The goal of this book is to provide information for anyone who wants to take the next step beyond the basics of current speech applications but isn’t yet ready to dive into the technical literature. It is hoped that this book will help project managers, application developers, and students gain a fuller and more complete understanding of spoken dialog technology and the practical aspects of developing and deploying spoken dialog applications.

For professional speech researchers, there is a rich technical literature covering many years of primary research in speech. However, this literature is not necessarily applicable to the needs of business people, application developers, and students who are interested in learning about the practical uses of speech technology. On the other hand, while existing introductory resources cover the basic mechanics of development of application development as well as aspects of the voice user interface, they don’t go far enough in dealing with the details that have to be taken into account to make spoken dialog systems successful in practice. What’s missing is information in between the in-depth technical literature and the more introductory development resources. The goal of this book is to provide information for anyone who wants to take the next step beyond the basics of current speech applications but isn’t yet ready to dive into the technical literature. It is hoped that this book will help project managers, application developers, and students gain a fuller and more complete understanding of spoken dialog technology and the practical aspects of developing and deploying spoken dialog applications.

This book covers state-of-the-art topics on the practical implementation of Spoken Dialog Systems and intelligent assistants in everyday applications. It presents scientific achievements in language processing that result in the development of successful applications and addresses general issues regarding the advances in Spoken Dialog Systems with applications in robotics, knowledge access and communication. Emphasis is placed on the following topics: speaker/language recognition, user modeling / simulation, evaluation of dialog system, multi-modality / emotion recognition from speech, speech data mining, language resource and databases, machine learning for spoken dialog systems and educational and healthcare applications.

This book provides a survey of the state-of-the-art in the practical implementation of Spoken Dialog Systems for applications in everyday settings. It includes contributions on key topics in situated dialog interaction from a number of leading researchers and offers a broad spectrum of perspectives on research and development in the area. In particular, it presents applications in robotics, knowledge access and communication and covers the following topics: dialog for interacting with robots; language understanding and generation; dialog architectures and modeling; core technologies; and the analysis of human discourse and interaction. The contributions are adapted and expanded contributions from the 2014 International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems (IWSDS 2014), where researchers and developers from industry and academia alike met to discuss and compare their implementation experiences, analyses and empirical findings.

As spoken natural language dialog systems technology continues to make great strides, numerous issues regarding dialog processing still need to be resolved. This book presents an exciting new dialog processing architecture that allows for a number of behaviors required for effective human-machine interactions, including: problem-solving to help the user carry out a task, coherent subdialog movement during the problem-solving process, user model usage, expectation usage for contextual interpretation and error correction, and variable initiative behavior for interacting with users of differing expertise. The book also details how different dialog problems in processing can be handled simultaneously, and provides instructions and in-depth result from pertinent experiments. Researchers and professionals in natural language systems will find this important new book an invaluable addition to their libraries.

Considerable progress has been made in recent years in the development of dialogue systems that support robust and efficient human-machine interaction using spoken language. Spoken dialogue technology allows various interactive applications to be built and used for practical purposes, and research focuses on issues that aim to increase the system's communicative competence by including aspects of error correction, cooperation, multimodality, and adaptation in context. This book gives a comprehensive view of state-of-the-art techniques that are used to build spoken dialogue systems. It provides an overview of the basic issues such as system architectures, various dialogue management methods, system evaluation, and also surveys advanced topics concerning extensions of the basic model to more conversational setups. The goal of the book is to provide an introduction to the methods, problems, and solutions that are used in dialogue system development and evaluation. It presents dialogue modelling and system development issues relevant in both academic and industrial environments and also discusses requirements and challenges for advanced interaction management and future research. Table of Contents: Preface / Introduction to Spoken Dialogue Systems / Dialogue Management / Error Handling / Case Studies: Advanced Approaches to Dialogue Management / Advanced Issues / Methodologies and Practices of Evaluation / Future Directions / References / Author Biographies

Spoken Dialogue Technology provides extensive coverage of spoken dialogue systems, ranging from the theoretical underpinnings of the study of dialogue through to a detailed look at a number of well-established methods and tools for developing spoken dialogue systems. The book enables students and practitioners to design and test dialogue systems using several available development environments and languages, including the CSLU toolkit, VoiceXML, SALT, and XHTML+ voice. This practical orientation is usually available otherwise only in reference manuals supplied with software development kits. The latest research in spoken dialogue systems is presented along with extensive coverage of the most relevant theoretical issues and a critical evaluation of current research prototypes. A dedicated web site containing supplementary materials, code, links to resources will enable readers to develop and test their own systems (). Previously such materials have been difficult to track down, available only on a range of disparate web sites and this web site provides a unique and useful reference source which will prove invaluable.

Data driven methods have long been used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis and have more recently been introduced for dialogue management, spoken language understanding, and Natural Language Generation. Machine learning is now present “end-to-end” in Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS). However, these techniques require data collection and annotation campaigns, which can be time-consuming and expensive, as well as dataset expansion by simulation. In this book, we provide an overview of the current state of the field and of recent advances, with a specific focus on adaptivity.

Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology and Design covers key topics in the field of spoken language dialogue interaction from a variety of leading researchers. It brings together several perspectives in the areas of corpus annotation and analysis, dialogue system construction, as well as theoretical perspectives on communicative intention, context-based generation, and modelling of discourse structure. These topics are all part of the general research and development within the area of discourse and dialogue with an emphasis on dialogue systems; corpora and corpus tools and semantic and pragmatic modelling of discourse and dialogue.