Office message center - a spoken dialogue system

This paper describes the experience gained from the structuring of a spoken dialogue system and its key components during the design and development of a telephony based office message center, it integrates auto-attendant, email accessing, meeting scheduling capabilities through spoken dialogue interface. A building block dialogue toolkit has been designed based on these experiences and efficiently applied to the office message center with the capabilities of automatic call routine, meeting scheduling and email access. This paper also introduces some of the key components constructed for the spoken dialogue system: ASR engine and robust semantic parser, dialogue management module with consideration of domain portability, configurable template based sentence generation, and text to speech strategy.