Prototype of Czech spoken dialog system with mixed initiative for railway information service

Abstract

This paper describes a prototype of a Czech dialog system with a mixed dialog initiative and a natural language understanding module. The described dialog system is designed for providing railway information such as arrivals, departures, prices and train types. The dialog can be driven by both an user of the system and a dialog manager to accomplish the dialog goal. In addition the user can use an almost arbitrary Czech utterance consistent with the dialog domain to interact with the system. The system accesses the train database on-line via the Internet. The version described in this paper works as a desktop computer application and communicates with the user using the headset. The paper describes the modules of the dialog system including automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, dialog manager, speech generation and speech synthesis. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.