Agents for integrated tutoring in spoken dialogue systems

In this paper, we introduce the concept of integrated tutoring in speech applications. An integrated tutoring system teaches the use of a system to a user while he/she is using the system in a typical manner. Furthermore, we introduce the general principles of how to implement applications with integrated tutoring agents and present an example implementation for an existing e-mail system. The main innovation of the approach is that the tutoring agents are part of the application, but implemented in a way which makes it possible to plug them into the system without modifying it. This is possible due to a set of small, stateless agents and a shared Information Storage provided by our system architecture. Integrated tutoring agents are easily expandable and configurable, and general agents can be shared between applications. We have also received positive feedback about integrated tutoring in initial user tests conducted with the implementation.