Dynamic User Interfaces for Semi-Structured Conversations

The growing complexity of application-to-application interactions has motivated the development of an architectural model with first-class support for multi-step, stateful message exchanges—i.e., conversations—and a declarative means of specifying conversational protocols. In this paper, we extend this architectural model to encompass UI-enabled devices, thereby enabling it to cover human-to-application conversations as well. This permits either participant to be human-driven, automated, or anywhere in between, without affecting the nature of the interaction or of the other participant. The UI-enabled conversational model also reduces the difficulty of developing conversational applications, providing significant benefits both for UI and for application developers. We describe the architecture of a UI-enabled conversational system that supports a variety of user devices, and includes a means by which UI markup may be automatically generated from the conversational protocols used. We go through a sample application currently implemented using a commercially available application server, and further describe a graphical tool for editing and testing conversational protocols, that significantly eases the protocol development process.