OwlSpeak - adaptive spoken dialogue within Intelligent Environments

In this paper we describe the OwlSpeak dialogue manager that enables adaptive spoken dialogue within Intelligent Environments. By facilitating an ontology-based model to define both dialogue domain and state during the ongoing dialogue we turn-wise generate VoiceXML dialogue snippets. We define adaptive dialogues to be adaptive regarding devices and services within the Intelligent Environment, events such as alerts that happen suddenly, and tasks, which may change and/or evolve during an ongoing human-system negotiation. After presenting a scenario that reflects the capabilities and challenges of the system we analyse an exemplary spoken dialogue. The focus of this publication lies on the underlying model - the Spoken Dialogue Ontology. We describe the logical framework of this ontology in detail and give some outlook on future work.