Patent Document ID: 7869998
Application ID: 10325295

Base Claim:
1. A voice-enabled spoken dialog service comprising: an automatic speech recognition module comprising a general-purpose acoustic model and a domain-specific model, wherein the general-purpose model is used for bootstrapping at initial deployment of the spoken dialog service and the domain-specific model is used to adapt the automatic speech recognition module after deployment, wherein a language corpus for the domain-specific acoustic model is drawn from at least one domain-specific website; a spoken language understanding module that performs text normalization, entity extraction and semantic classification using a boosting approach that balances human-crafted rules with available data; a dialog management module that comprises an interpreter, finite state machine engine and an action template; a text-to-speech synthesis module for synthesizing speech; and a frequently asked questions module, wherein the spoken dialog service communicates with the user in a first voice, and wherein the frequently asked questions module performs: receiving an utterance from the user; determining whether the utterance is a frequently asked question; if the utterance is a frequently asked question, answering the frequently asked question in a second voice; and after answering the frequently asked question in the second voice, providing a prompt in the second voice to return the user to the first voice.

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Claim 4:
4. The voice-enabled spoken dialog service of claim 1 , wherein the text-to-speech synthesizer module synthesizes speech using a screenwriting dialog technique where a back story is created for the synthesized voice based on a desired character trait.