Multilingual Natural Language Processing Applications: From Theory to Practice

Chapter 15. Spoken Dialog Systems

Roberto Pieraccini and David Suendermann

15.1. Introduction

In this chapter we discuss the issues related to the development of commercial spoken dialog systems. A spoken dialog system is a complex machine that manages goal-oriented user interactions. The functional architecture of spoken interaction is generally broken down into three main components: the speech recognition and understanding module, the speech generation module, and the dialog manager. A large amount of literature about research dialog systems and their various development paradigms is available; here we discuss the problems and approaches related to the design, development, deployment, and maintenance of commercial spoken dialog applications. ...