From VoiceXML to multimodal mobile Apps: development of practical conversational interfaces

Abstract

Speech Technologies and Language Processing have made possible the development of a number of new applications which are based on conversational interfaces. In this paper, we describe two approaches to bridge the gap between the academic and industrial perspectives in order to develop conversational interfaces using an academic paradigm for dialog management while employing the industrial standards. The advances in these technologies have made possible to extend the initial applications of conversational interfaces from only spoken interaction (for instance, by means of VoiceXML-based systems) to multimodal services by means of mobile devices (for instance, using the facilities provided by the Android OS). Our proposal has been evaluated with the successful development of different spoken and multimodal conversational interfaces.