The INPROTK 2012 Release: A Toolkit for Incremental Spoken Dialogue Processing

We describe the 2012 release of INPROTK, our “Incremental Processing Toolkit” which combines a powerful and extensible architecture for incremental processing with components for incremental speech recognition and, new to this release, incremental speech synthesis. These components work domainindependently; we also provide example implementations of higher-level components such as natural language understanding and dialogue management that are somewhat more tied to a particular domain. The toolkit is accompanied by evaluation tools for analysing timing behaviour, and we highlight some timing results on conversational speech input in this paper. We offer our toolkit to foster research in this new and exciting area, which promises to help increase the naturalness of behaviours that can be modelled in such systems.