DialPort: Connecting the spoken dialog research community to real user data

This paper describes a new spoken dialog portal that connects systems produced by the spoken dialog academic research community and gives them access to real users. We introduce a distributed, multi-modal, multi-agent prototype dialog framework that affords easy integration with various remote resources, ranging from end-to-end dialog systems to external knowledge APIs. The portal provides seamless passage from one spoken dialog system to another. To date, the DialPort portal has successfully connected to the multi-domain spoken dialog system at Cambridge University, the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) weather API and the Yelp API. We present statistics derived from log data gathered during preliminary tests of the portal on the performance of the portal and on the quality (seamlessness) of the transition from one system to another.