An Integrated Development Environment for Spoken Dialogue Systems

Development environments for spoken dialogue processing systems are of particular interest because the turn-around time for a dialogue system is high while at the same time a considerable amount of components can be reused with little or no modifications. We describe an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for spoken dialogue systems. The IDE allows application designers to interactively specify reusable building blocks called dialogue packages for dialogue systems. Each dialogue package consists of an assembly of data sources, including an object-oriented domain model, a task model and grammars. We show how the dialogue packages can be specified through a graphical user interface with the help of a wizard.