Robust Dialog Management Architecture Using VoiceXML for Car Telematics Systems

This chapter describes a dialog management architecture for car telematics systems. The system supports spontaneous user utterances and variable communication conditions between the in-car client and the remote server. The communication is based on VoiceXML over HTTP, and the design of the server-side application is based on DialogXML and ScenarioXML, which are layered extensions of VoiceXML. These extensions provide support for state-and-transition dialog programming, access to dynamic external databases, and sharing of commonly-used dialogs via templates. The client system includes a set of small grammars and lexicons for various tasks; only relevant grammars and lexicons are activated under the control of the dialog manager. The serverside applications are integrated via an abstract interface, and the client system may include compact versions of the same applications. The VoiceXML interpreter can switch between applications on both sides intelligently. This helps to reduce bandwidth utilization, and allows the system to continue even if the communication channel is lost.