Abstract

This thesis presents work done during the last ten years on developing five multimodal spoken dialogue systems, and the empirical user studies that have been conducted with them. The dialogue systems have been multimodal, giving information both verbally with animated talking characters and graphically on maps and in text tables. To be able to study a wider rage of user behaviour each new system has been in a new domain and with a new set of interactional abilities. The five system presented in this thesis are: The Waxholm system where users could ask about the boat traffic in the Stockholm archipelago; the Gulan system where people could retrieve information from the Yellow pages of Stockholm; the August system which was a publicly available system where people could get information about the author Strindberg, KTH and Stockholm; the AdApt system that allowed users to browse apartments for sale in Stockholm and the Pixie system where users could help an animated agent to fix things in a visionary apartment publicly available at the Telecom museum in

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