What if everyone could do it? A framework for easier spoken dialog system design

While Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) still represent the most common way of operating modern computing technology, Spoken Dialog Systems (SDS) have the potential to offer a more natural and intuitive mode of interaction. Even though some may say that existing speech recognition is neither reliable nor practical, the success of recent product releases such as Apple's Siri or Nuance's Dragon Drive suggests that language-based interaction is increasingly gaining acceptance. Yet, unlike applications for building GUIs, tools and frameworks that support the design, construction and maintenance of dialog systems are rare. A particular challenge of SDS design is the often complex integration of technologies. Systems usually consist of several components (e.g. speech recognition, language understanding, output generation, etc.), all of which require expertise to deploy them in a given application domain. This paper presents work in progress that aims at supporting this integration process. We propose a framework of components and describe how it may be used to prototype and gradually implement a spoken dialog system without requiring extensive domain expertise.