Voice input for collaborative systems

Collaborative decision making is a central part of command and control, logistics, planning, and many other applications where multiple people work together to solve a common problem and need to be able to view the same information. This paper focuses on issues in bringing voice input to collaborative environments, ranging from practical considerations of how we can incorporate speech input today, through future systems where we want the computer system to be a contributing member of the dialog. Along the way, I describe some ongoing work at BBN on dialog and collaborative systems that are both solving existing problems and paving the way to future collaborative dialog systems.