2. Article Review: Spoken Dialogue Technology: Enabling the Conversational User MICHAEL F.M C TEAR University of Ulster University of Ulster This article has been reviewed by Gregory A. Vaughn Sr., in partial fulfillment of course DCxxx course, Summer of 2004

3. The author has endeavored to provide a complete survey of the state of research into spoken dialogue technologies. The paper focuses on a number of components namely: - speech recognition; - language understanding; - dialogue management; - communication with external sources such as databases; - language generation; - speech synthesis The author examines, the then, most current advances in the field, not only for spoken dialogue technology but also for the underlying computer technology employed. “There is a focus on surveying underlying technologies rather than existing spoken dialogue systems”.

4. Spoken Dialogue System Definition Classification of Dialogue Systems by Control Strategies Components of a Spoken Dialogue System Speech Recognition Language Understanding Dialogue management External Communication Response generation text to Speech Synthesis Review a number of Architectures and Dialogue Control Strategies –Speech Corpora –Wizard-of-Oz studies –Speech and Language Understanding Components Guidelines and Standards for Spoken language Systems

5. Categories Finite state – the user is taken thru a series of predefined steps or states Frame Based – user is asked questions that enable the system to fill-in slots on a template in order to perform tasks Agent Based – the system is designed to permit complex communication between the user and the underlying component

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