ATOM Chameleon Template

What is a Dialogue Manager?

The core of a voice user interface, a dialogue manager plays the central role to control the interaction between a user and an application, such as a car navigation system, a robot or an MP3 player. It is the dialogue manager that enables the complex interactions that are not possible with speech recognition technology alone. In particular, a dialogue manager decides when to ask what question to determine the users' intention.

Different applications require different patterns of interaction between the user and the system. A pattern of interaction that is appropriate for a telephony application may not be appropriate for a safety critical application such as car navigation systems. Consequently, the dialogue manager has to be programmed differently. The ATOM Spoken Dialogue SDK meets this requirement by providing Chameleon, a mechanism to process exchangeable dialogue templates.

Existing Approaches

There are two different approaches that are currently used to develop spoken dialogue applications.

1. Reusable framework
2. Template

Reusable Framework Approach

In the following graphics, the square represents the development effort to build a spoken language application.

This apporach uses existing libraries to support the development of spoken dialogue applications (Library Functions, shown in the bottom half). The application specific part (shown in the upper half) needs to be implemented by the developer for each application. The advantages and disadvantages are as follows:

The Template Approach

Another approach uses reusable dialogue algorithms to facilitate the development of applications. In addition to the lbrary functions, a generic dialogue algorithm is provided to the developer. VoiceXML's Form Interpretation Algorithm is an example for this approach.

The amount of programming is reduced compared to the previous approach. However, since the template may contain assumptions on the form of the interaction, this approach is only applicable if the template fits the application. If it does not, this approach cannot be used.

ATOM Solution: Chameleon

Chameleon, the solution provided by the ATOM Spoken Dialogue SDK, employs a reusable framework as illustrated above. In addition, it supports the easy exchange of templates, represented in green in the image below. This means that whenever the interaction between user and system needs to meet specific requirements, the template can be adapted to the needs of the application.

Templates are written in ECMAScript to ease the implementation. In order to design effective templates, some experience with voice user interfaces may be helpful. However, compared to previous approaches, building dialogue managers using templates dramatically simplifies the implementation of complex voice user interfaces.

Several templates are included in the ATOM Spoken Dialogue SDK that can be used as starting points and adapted to suit individual needs.