Building practical spoken dialog systems

Abstract

This tutorial will give a practical description of the free software Carnegie Mellon Olympus 2 Spoken Dialog Architecture. Building real working dialog systems that are robust enough for the general public to use is difficult. Most frequently, the functionality of the conversations is severely limited - down to simple question-answer pairs. While off-the-shelf toolkits help the development of such simple systems, they do not support more advanced, natural dialogs nor do they offer the transparency and flexibility required by computational linguistic researchers. However, Olympus 2 offers a complete dialog system with automatic speech recognition (Sphinx) and synthesis (SAPI, Festival) and has been used, along with previous versions of Olympus, for teaching and research at Carnegie Mellon and elsewhere for some 5 years. Overall, a dozen dialog systems have been built using various versions of Olympus, handling tasks ranging from providing bus schedule information to guidance through maintenance procedures for complex machinery, to personal calendar management. In addition to simplifying the development of dialog systems, Olympus provides a transparent platform for teaching and conducting research on all aspects of dialog systems, including speech recognition and synthesis, natural language understanding and generation, and dialog and interaction management.