SALT is an industrial standard that enables speech input/output for Web applications. Although the core design is to make simple tasks easy, SALT gives the designers ample fine-grained controls to create advanced user interface. The paper exploits a speech input mode in which SALT would dynamically report partial semantic parses while audio capturing is still ongoing. The semantic parses can be evaluated and the outcome reported immediately back to the user. The potential impact for the dialog systems is that tasks conventionally performed in a system turn can now be carried out in the midst of a user turn, thereby presenting a significant departure from the conventional turn-taking. To assess the efficacy of such highly interactive interface, more user studies are undoubtedly needed. This paper demonstrates how SALT can be employed to facilitate such studies.

In this paper, we discuss why surveys are an interesting application of spoken dialog systems from both commercial and research perspectives. We then describe a prototype survey spoken dialog system, the Rate-A-Course system. We show how dialog epiphenomena, including the order in which questions are answered and the duration of respondents ’ answers, can be used to learn information beyond that covered explicitly by survey questions. Index Terms — Speech communication 1.