From single word to natural dialogue

Spoken language dialogue systems represent the peak of achievement in speech technologies in the 20 th century and appear set to form the basis for the increasingly natural interactive systems to follow in the coming decades. This chapter first presents a model of the task-oriented spoken dialogue system, its multiple aspects and some of the remaining research challenges. In the context of this model, a first general model is presented of the complex tasks performed by dialogue managers in state-of-the-art spoken language dialogue systems. The dialogue management model is aimed to support best practice in spoken language dialogue systems development and evaluation.