Graphic platform for designing and developing practical voice interaction systems

A complete development environment for designing, building and running voice operated services has been created. It offers a system builder a graphic platform with several types of blocks, such as an ASR block, a TTS one, a switch block, a database query block, etc. Even a large dialogue scheme can be realized in very short time simply by placing blocks on the form, specifying their properties and aligning them into meaningful dialogue branches. Sequencing the blocks into branches is solved in a unique way without using any interconnecting lines, which makes the dialogue scheme easy for editing. The platform, named LOTOS, has been employed in building a large multi-domain information system with voice access via telephone.