The CU communicator: an architecture for dialogue systems

This paper presents our recent work towards development of the University of Colorado (CU) Communicator, an interactive dialogue system for airline, hotel and rental car information. The CU Communicator integrates speech recognition, synthesis and natural language understanding technologies using the DARPA Hub Architecture to allow users to converse with an automated travel agent. During a typical telephonebased interaction, users can retrieve up-to-date travel information such as flight schedules, pricing, along with hotel and rental car availability. The CU Communicator has been under development since April of 1999 and represents our test-bed system for developing robust human-computer interactions where reusability and dialogue system portability serve as two main goals of our work. This paper will focus on describing our recent system improvements and will present an analysis of dialogues received and lessons learned.