Strategies to Reduce Design Time in Multimodal/multilingual Dialog Applications

In this paper, we present a complete platform for the semiautomatic generation of human-machine dialog systems, that using as input a description of the database of the service, a flow model with the different states of the final application and a guided interaction step by step with the designer's intervention, generates dialogs to access the service data in different languages and two modalities, speech and web, simultaneously. We describe in detail several strategies that have been followed to reduce the time needed to do the design using the mentioned information. We also address important issues in dialog applications as mixed initiative and overanswering dialogs, confirmation handling and how to provide the user long lists of information