STRUCTURE FOR USER-ORIENTED DIALOGS IN COMPUTER-AIDED TELEPHONY

Members of The Speech Project, at Oxford Brookes University, have been experimenting with alternative structures for 'goal-seeking' dialogue s. A dialogue prototyping system has been developed that can instantia te different dialogue structures kept on file. These become active aft er being installed using dynamic data structures. Input is achieved us ing speech recognition for a small range of words, and output is in th e form of pre-recorded speech messages. The dialogues thus created emp loy a new approach, and replace the usual menu-structure with a simple r question-answer process. The nature of dialogues using computer aide d telephony is analysed, and then the work done by members of The Spee ch Project on an alternative approach using a simpler dialogue structu re is described.