Abstract

We describe the design and implementation of the dialogue management module in a voice operated car-driver information system. The literature on designing 'good' user interfaces involving naturM language dialogue in general and speech in particular is abundant with use- ful guidelines for actual development. We have tried to summarize these guidelines in 7 'meta- guidelines', or commandments. Even though state-of-the-art Speech Recognition modules perform well, speech recognition errors cannot be precluded. For'the current application, the fact that the car is an acoustically hostile environment is an extra complication. This means that special attention should be paid to effective methods to compensate for speech recognition errors. Moreover, this should be done in a way which is not disturbing for the driver. In this paper, we show how these con- straints influence the design and subsequent implementation of the Dialogue Manager mod- ule, and how the additional requirements fit in with the 7 commandments.

Citations