Implementing Dialog Management

There is a wide range of tools that support the generation of rule-based dialog managers for conversational interfaces. However, it is not as easy to find toolkits to develop statistical dialog managers based on reinforcement learning and/or corpus-based techniques. In this chapter, we have selected the VoiceXML standard to put into practice the handcrafted approach, given that this standard is used widely in industry to develop voice user interfaces. The second part of the chapter describes the use of a statistical dialog management technique to show the application of this kind of methodology for the development of practical conversational interfaces.