Integration of dialogue patterns into the conceptual model of storyboard design

Abstract

Web information systems, e.g. modern e-commerce platforms, become nowadays more sophisticated, cope with more complex applications and support an integration of speech dialogues. Their workflow and supporting infrastructure can be specified by storyboards. The integration of speech dialogues is however an unsolved issue due to the required flexibility, to the wide variety of responses and the expected nativeness. Classical keyword-based search cannot cope with such interaction media. This paper extends storyboarding by speech dialogues. Speech dialogues must be very flexible in both recognition of answers and in generation of appropriate answers. We thus introduce a pattern-based approach to specification and utilisation of speech dialogues. The paper shows that it is possible to create patterns for common dialogue-forms. Consequently they are integrated into the storyboard model and build the basis for the modeling of natural dialogues in web information systems. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.