Patent ID: 8396713

Claim:
A method of handling an utterance, the method comprising: carrying out recognition of the utterance with a finite state grammar; carrying out recognition of the utterance with a statistical language model built for a dialog state using data collected from user interactions with the dialog state; using a statistical action classifier to find at least one semantic interpretation of the utterance; using at least one processor, comparing a first result of the recognition of the utterance with the finite state grammar and a second result of the recognition of the utterance with the statistical language model; and deciding which of the first result and the second result to keep as a final recognition result including: selecting the first result, for output, as the final recognition result if a confidence score of the first result of the recognition of the utterance with the finite state grammar is greater than a confidence score of the second result of the recognition of the utterance with the statistical language model, and selecting the second result, for output, as the final recognition result if the confidence score of the second result of the recognition of the utterance with the statistical language model is greater than the confidence score of the first result of the recognition of the utterance with the finite state grammar.