Dialog with a Personal Assistant

This paper describes a new generic architecture for dialog systems enabling communication between a human user and a personal assistant based on speech acts. Dialog systems are often domain-related applications. That is, the system is developed for specific applications and cannot be reused in other domains. A major problem concerns the development of scalable dialog systems capable to be extended with new tasks without much effort. In this paper we discuss a generic dialog architecture for a personal assistant. The assistant uses explicit task representation and knowledge to achieve an “intelligent” dialog. The independence of the dialog architecture from knowledge and from tasks allows the agent to be extended without needing to modify the dialog structure. The system has been implemented in a collaborative environment in order to personalize services and to facilitate the interaction with collaborative applications like e-mail clients, document managers or design tools.