A prototype sun sensor has been developed. It consists of a thin slice of silicon coated with a layer of chrome and a layer of gold with hundreds of small pinholes, placed on top of an Active Pixel Sensor (APS) image detector at a distance of 500 microns. Images of the sun are formed on the APS image detector when the sun illuminates the mask. Image processing of the Sun image is performed exte...

This paper focuses on the evaluation of the German Sundial Demonstrator maintaining interactive conversations via microphone and telephone with users. The word recognizer was implemented by the University of Erlangen and currently obtains on our test set a word accuracy of over 92% in a speaker{independent task with perplexity 111. We also participated in the design and implementation of the mu...

This paper presents a first set of test results on the generality and objectivity of the Dialogue Evaluation Tool DET. Building on the assumption that most, if not all, dialogue design errors can be viewed as problems of non-cooperative system behaviour, DET has two closely related aspects to its use. Firstly, it may be used for the diagnostic evaluation of spoken human-machine dialogue. Follow...

Present limits of speech recognition and understandi¢,g in the context of free spoken language (alttumgh with a limited vocabulary) have perverse effects on the flow of the dialogue with a system. Typically a non robtt~'t dialogue manager will fail to face with these limits and conversations will often be a failure. This paper presents some possibilities of a structural approach for handling co...

This paper presents a first set of test results on the generality and transferability of an evaluation tool which can ensure the habitability and usability of spoken dialogues. Building on the assumption that most, if not all, dialogue design errors can be viewed as problems of non-cooperative system behaviour, the tool has two closely related aspects to its use. Firstly, it may be used for the...

One of the most obvious and natural applications for speech technology is in providing a gateway to information services over the telephone network. Already a significant growth is occurring the provision of information from a centralised computing system using stored messages or synthetic speech derived from text files. Most of these systems however currently rely on the use of touch tone inpu...