Patent ID: 7024368

Claim:
A man-machine dialogue system comprising an interactive computer system with: an input device for receiving speech input from a user; an output device for generating output to a user; an object system which is an information source or store, or a command and control device, the object of the dialogue being to interface between this system and a user, wherein the object system further comprises knowledge sources to assist recognition; a dialogue manager, which controls the dialogue between the object system and a user comprising: a dialogue specification applied to the speech input from the user during recognition comprising: a set of augmented transition networks (ATNs), having a set of states, wherein each state is one of a question/answer cycle, data processing, a simple junction, and a sub-dialogue state; one or more tokens propagated through the states, each token comprising a set of fields which together define a current state of belief of a dialogue controller, dependent upon the preceding user-system interchanges and information obtained from the object system.