EUROPA: a generic framework for developing spoken dialogue systems

Voice interfaces are not popular since they are neither useful nor user-friendly for non-specialist users. In this paper, EUROPA, a new framework for developing spoken dialogue systems, is introduced. In developing EUROPA, the authors focused on three points : (1) acceptance of spoken language, (2) portability in terms of domain and task, and (3) practical performance of the applied system. The framework is applied to prototyping a car navigation system called MINOS. MINOS is built on a portable PC, can process over 700 words of recognition vocabulary, and is able to respond to a user’s question within a few seconds.