Building 10,000 spoken dialogue systems

Spoken dialogue systems are not yet ubiquitous. But with an easy enough development tool, at a low enough cost, and on portable enough software, advances in spoken dialogue technology could soon enable the rapid development of 10000 or more spoken dialogue systems for a wide variety of applications. To achieve this goal, we propose a toolkit approach for research and development of spoken dialogue systems. The paper presents the CSLU toolkit which integrates spoken dialogue technology with an easy to use interface. The toolkit supports rapid prototyping, iterative design, empirical evaluation, training of specialized speech recognizers and tools for conducting research to improve the underlying technology. We describe the toolkit with an emphasis on graphical creation of spoken dialogue systems; the transition of the toolkit into the user community; and research directed toward improvements in the toolkit.