This architecture is similar in spirit to a production system. Building a spoken dialogue system is labor intensive and requires a great deal of expertise. A major focus of our research is to develop tools to facilitate rapid development of spoken dialogue applications by developers who are not speech and NL experts. Developers can use these grammars rather than writing their own. These libraries will be distributed with the natural language system.
Users call the system on the telephone and make travel plans.
We are using the system as a testbed for technology development in this project. For the system, we implemented a new Dialogue Manager using the event driven strategy. In combination with Carnegie Mellon University we have developed an initial library of grammars and mapping functions like times and dates. Our natural language and dialogue specification for the task is very much declarative. Only a minimum amount of C code is required.