Challenges for Spoken Dialogue Systems

The past decade has seen the development of a large number of spoken dialogue systems around the world, both as research prototypes and commercial applica-tions. These systems allow users to interact with a machine to retrieve information, conduct transactions, or perform other problem-solving tasks. In this paper we discuss some of the design issues which confront de-velopers of spoken dialogue systems, provide some ex-amples of research being undertaken in this area, and describe some of the ongoing challenges facing current spoken language technology. 1