We are building a generic system in which speech synthesis and speech recognition can be studied in a man-machine dialogue framework. In addition, the system should facilitate the collection of speech and text data that are required for the development of the system. The demonstrator application, that we call WAXHOLM, gives information on boat traffic in the Stockholm archipelago. A fleet of some twenty boats from the Waxholm company connect about two hundred ports. Different days of the week have different time tables.
Besides the speech recognition and synthesis components, the system contains modules that handle graphic information such as pictures, maps, charts, and time-tables. This information can be presented to the user at his/her request. The application has great similarities to the ATIS domain within the ARPA community and other similar tasks in Europe, for example SUNDIAL. The possibility to expand the task in many directions is an advantage for our future research on interactive dialogue systems. An initial version of the system based on text input has been running since September 1992.
The dialogue system is implemented as a number of independent and specialized modules that run as servers on our computer system. A notation has been defined to control the information flow between them. The structure makes it possible to run the system in parallel on different machines and facilitates the implementation and testing of alternate models within the same framework. The communication software is based on UNIX de facto standards, which will facilitate the reuse and portability of the components.
Reference AN EXPERIMENTAL DIALOGUE SYSTEM: WAXHOLMMats Blomberg, Rolf Carlson, Kjell Elenius, Björn Granström, Joakim Gustafson, Sheri Hunnicutt, Roger Lindell, Lennart Neovius and Lennart Nord (paper - 7 pages, Postscript 125kb)