A spoken dialogue system for conference/workshop services

This paper describes our progress towards building a telephony-based spoken dialogue system for workshop/conference services. A mixed-initiative dialogue system has been developed that is engineered to o er users natural interaction with the system, ease-of-use and robustness towards ambiguous requests and machine errors. A prototype system, known as W99, is described in this paper which was deployed in the 1999 IEEE International Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU'99), Keystone, Colorado. This system integrates advanced technologies in speech and dialogue design. An evaluation of the W99 system in terms of recognition performance, understanding accuracy and dialogue success rate during the live trial of the system are presented in this paper.