Speechbuilder: facilitating spoken dialogue system development

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we report our attempts to facilitate the creation of mixed-initiative spoken dialogue systems for both novice and experienced developers of human language technology. Our efforts have resulted in the creation of a utility called SpeechBuilder, whichallows developers to specify linguistic information about their domains, and rapidly create spoken dialogue interfaces to them. SpeechBuilder has been used to create domains providing access to structured information contained in a relational database, as well as toprovide human language interfaces to control or transaction-based applications. 1