Spoken Dialogue in Virtual Worlds

Human-computer conversations have attracted a great deal of interest especially in virtual worlds. In fact, research gave rise to spoken dialogue systems by taking advantage of speech recognition, language understanding and speech synthesis advances. This work surveys the state of the art of speech dialogue systems. Current dialogue system technologies and approaches are first introduced emphasizing differences between them, then, speech recognition and synthesis and language understanding are introduced as complementary and necessary modules. On the other hand, as the development of spoken dialogue systems becomes more complex, it is necessary to define some processes to evaluate their performance. Wizard-of-Oz techniques play an important role to achieve this task. Thanks to this technique is obtained a suitable dialogue corpus necessary to achieve good performance. A description of this technique is given in this work together with perspectives on multimodal dialogue systems in virtual worlds.