Man-machine speech 'dialogue acts'.

In the future, speech will increasingly become the preferred medium of communication between man and machine. For this to be successfully achieved attention must be given to the structuring of man-machine speech dialogues. The present paper outlines a preliminary classification of such dialogues in terms of 'dialogue acts' and 'subdialogues'. The general features necessary for an interactive information service, using an isolated word recogniser and synthetic speech output, are suggested and a hierarchy of appropriate modes of data entry is proposed.