A voice activated dialogue system for fast-food restaurant applications

We present a preliminary version of a voice dialogue system suitable to deal with client orders and questions in fast-food restaurants. The system consists of two main sub-systems, namely a dialogue sub-system and a voice interface. The dialogue sub-system is a natural language processing system that may be considered a rule-based expert system, whose behaviour is decided from a recorded dialogue corpus obtained at a real restaurant. In this paper we present a general description of both sub-systems, and focus on knowledge representation, grammar, and module structure of the dialogue sub-system. An introduction to the natural language generation mechanism used is introduced, and future work is mentioned. Finally some conclusions are shown.