A distributed cloud-based dialog system for conversational application development

Abstract

We have previously presented HALEF-an open-source spoken dialog system-that supports telephonic interfaces and has a distributed architecture. In this paper, we extend this infrastructure to be cloud-based, and thus truly distributed and scalable. This cloud-based spoken dialog system can be accessed both via telephone interfaces as well as through web clients with WebRTC/HTMF5 integration, allowing in-browser access to potentially multimodal dialog applications. We demonstrate the versatility of the system with two conversation applications in the educational domain.