A design environment for acoustic interfaces to databases

We present a novel service creation environment for spoken dialogue interfaces to databases. On the dialogue level, all procedural information has been hidden in the dialogue manager such that the application designer is relieved of the exact specification of individual dialogue steps and can work purely declaratively. The declarations comprise an application's tasks and the parameters needed from the user. On the linguistic level, the designer is requested to provide application specific templates, words, and phrases. A speech generator and a speech interpreter supply the deep linguistic knowledge that is necessary to produce the system's announcements and to recognize and interpret the user's utterances.