Development of a Spoken Dialogue System for accessing Agricultural Information in Telugu

In this paper we describe the development of Mandi Information System, a Telugu spoken dialogue system for obtaining price information of agricultural commodities like vegetables, fruits, pulses, spices, etc.. The target users of MIS are primarily the farmers in rural and semiurban areas. Speech recognition is error prone and it is necessary for the dialogue system to make minimum number of errors while acquiring information from a user and also to detect errors (if not correctable) and adopt appropriate strategies. In this paper we suggest an approach to improve the performance and usability of the system by using multiple decoders and contextual information.