A German dialogue system for scheduling dates and meetings by naturally spoken continuous speech

In this paper, we present the basic design principles and architecture of a dialogue system for scheduling appointments. This mixed-initiative dialogue system integrates an automatic speaker-independent speech recognition engine for continuously spoken German, a speech synthesizer and a scheduler database application to build up a scheduler that is purely driven by natural continuous speech and thus, does not need any visual display device. With these properties it is a prototype for a speech driven palm-size computer application and could be integrated in miniature computers that come along with no display device at all.