Patent ID: 7409690

Claim:
A method for managing distributed modality components using dialogue states of a multimodal application, comprising the steps of: initiating the multimodal application; determining a set of activation conditions associated with a dialogue state of the multimodal application; loading said activation conditions in the set of activation conditions into a modality component server having a shared memory and an interface, each of said activation conditions being linked to at least one programmatic action, wherein different programmatic actions are executed by different modality components, wherein each of said modality components publishes a set of programmatic actions for that modality component, and wherein a multimodal engine includes activation rules specify activation conditions and programmatic actions; monitoring said activation conditions and the dialog state; running said activation conditions based upon an application event; responsively initiating the at least one programmatic action linked to an occurrence of a fired activation condition; and updating the dialogue state upon execution of the at least one programmatic action.