Where do we go from here? Research and commercial spoken dialog systems

Abstract

The spoken dialog industry has reached a maturity characterized by a vertical structure of technology vendors, platform integrators, application developers, and hosting companies. At the same time industrial standards are pervading the underlying technology and providing higher and higher levels of interoperability. On one hand commercial dialog systems are largely based on a pragmatic approach which aims at usability and task completion. On the other hand, spoken dialog research has been moving on a parallel path trying to attain naturalness and freedom of communication. However, the evolution of the commercial path shows that naturalness and freedom of expression are not necessarily a prerequisite for usability, given the constraints of the current technology. The difference between the two goals has been influencing a parallel evolution of the architectures and in particular of the dialog management abstractions. We believe it is the time to get a high level perspective on both lines of work, and aim to a synergistic convergence.