Novel Approach to Spoken Dialogue Management in Intelligent Environments

Intelligent Environments consist of various entities and in parallel provide and execute different tasks. Since neither the sets of entities nor the tasks may remain constant while the user interacts with the system, we speak of a changing nature of such environments. Hereunder we have revealed adaptation as the major characteristic of an SDM allowing for a consistent interface provision. We have presented several approaches to SDM that partly cover specific aspects of adaptation or adaptivity in Sect. 2.4. However, in order to develop a system that provides adaptive spoken dialogue within IEs, it is necessary to denote a general definition of adaptation. This definition concerns the three main stakeholders involved in spoken interaction: the user(s), the SDS, and the IE. Of course, the fourth party involved is the ASDM, which seems to play a key role: while the ASDM must handle adaptation, the other parties provoke it. In the following we discuss our proposed definition and provide a complete description of adaptivity regarding the stakeholders mentioned above.