The technology of interaction—dialogue programming rules

The availability of low-cost interactive computing for commercial applications makes it attractive to give end-users direct access to computers in a “conversational” mode. The need to minimize typing by the user leads to the conversational dialogues consisting of a series of “prompts” and responses. Such dialogue sequences are now being programmed into a wide range of systems, but there are currently available only limited guidelines on appropriate programming techniques. This paper expresses the view that the programming of interactive dialogue is an important technology for software engineering in its own right. It develops systematically a set of “rules” for dialogue programming and discusses them in terms of user psychology. It is hoped that this definitive approach will lead to additions, extensions, and refinements, to these rules, eventually generating a recognized technology for dialogue engineering .