Zanzibar OpenIVR: An Open-Source Framework for Development of Spoken Dialog Systems

The maturity of standards and the availability of open source components for all levels of the MRCP stack provide us with new opportunities for the development of spoken dialog technology. In this paper a standard-based and modular architecture for interactive voice response (IVR) systems is presented together with its implementation – Zanzibar OpenIVR. The architecture, described in terms of components and standards, is compared to other existing frameworks. The usage of our framework is discussed regarding different aspects of spoken dialog technology such as speech recognition and synthesis, integration of the components, dialog management, natural language understanding. It is designed to work over VoIP as well as with usual telephony communication channels, thus provides an ability for web based access. Zanzibar OpenIVR is able to serve as a starting point for building dialog systems and research in voice-enabled technologies.