Step 4: Dialogue Development

Dialogue development is the process of specifying the actions an interaction manager should take. Actions can be specified as response to speech recognition input, timeouts, low confidence values or more.

Tools for Dialogue Development:

The tools provided in the voice toolkit allow an application developer to write dialogue scripts in an extended version of ECMAScript. The extensions allow the application developer to specify conditions and actions the interaction manager should undertake, as well as to reference grammars in a context-dependent way.

Integrated with the interaction manager is an SQL compatible database. Semantic interpretations from the recognition and natural language understanding process can be converted easily to SQL queries.

Results of Dialogue Development Development:

The result of the dialogue development process consists of one or more dialogue script files. Dialogue script files and grammar files can be packaged for modular application development.

Supported Standards and APIs for Dialogue Development:

ECMAScript Compact Framework

ECMAScript Compact Framework is used to specify the dialogue processing algorithms. Extensions to ECMAScript are used to specify conditions and actions.

SAPI 4.0 and 5.1

SAPI 4.0 or SAPI 5.1 compliant speech synthesis engines can be used to synthesize text generated by the interaction manager.

Support for SQL Databases

SQL databases can be directly accessed from the interaction manager. The retrieved datasets can be converted to text and presented to the user.

Proprietary Extensions:

The proprietary extensions allow the application developer to match conditions against the output of the semantic interpretation process. The conditions and actions are specified using proprietary extensions in ECMAScript.