The Role of Spoken Dialogue in User–Environment Interaction

Publisher Summary This chapter reviews the role of spoken dialogue in such environments. It begins by describing and comparing the functions and technical characteristics of different spoken dialogue applications, including voice control, call routing, voice search, and question answering. This is followed by a review of recent research that illustrates the current state of the art in spoken dialogue systems for ambient intelligence environments. It examines the technological requirements for spoken dialogue systems in ambient intelligence environments. Currently many commercially operational systems are able to automate a variety of customer services, such as providing flight information, weather forecasts, sports results, and share prices. They can also support transactions such as booking hotels, renting cars, making payments, or downloading ringtones for mobile phones. These systems free human operators from mundane tasks that can be easily automated and for which spoken dialogue is a natural mode of communication. There are also systems that accept spoken input to record information for data entry, such as medical reports or accident reports for insurance companies. For these systems the information interpreted by the system is transcribed either into predefined forms or rendered as a dictated document. The chapter concludes with an overview of challenges and future prospects for this emerging technology.

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