Automatic dialogue generator creates user defined applications

We report on the development of an Automatic Dialogue Generator (ADG), a software engine with associated library files, that simplifies the generation of new applications requiring a speech interface. A key feature of the ADG is that, given any task description specified in tables, the ADG can automatically generate a finite-state dialogue for that task, in a uniform and consistent fashion. The ADG generates a connected graph structure that provides the general dialogue flow between dialogue states, as well as all the dialogue and action components within each state. Our design philosophy is to build an Application Generator (AG) that is highly portable. The AG contains four modular pieces, of which one is the ADG described here. The ADG consists of domain independent modules used to create a unique dialogue for each individual. The ADG accomplishes this by combining information from a user’s profile with information from external sources to generate a dynamic and user-specific dialogue flow. The user specifies types of services, such as Sports and Email, and keywords are defined to prune and organize the information for each service.