Assembling the jigsaw: How multiple open standards are synergistically combined in the HALEF multimodal dialog system

Abstract

As dialog systems become increasingly multimodal and distributed in nature with advances in technology and computing power, they become that much more complicated to design and implement. However, open industry and W3C standards provide a silver lining here, allowing the distributed design of different components that are nonetheless compliant with each other. In this chapter we examine how an open-source, modular, multimodal dialog system-HALEF-can be seamlessly assembled, much like a jigsaw puzzle, by putting together multiple distributed components that are compliant with the W3C recommendations or other open industry standards. We highlight the specific standards that HALEF currently uses along with a perspective on other useful standards that could be included in the future. HALEF has an open codebase to encourage progressive community contribution and a common standard testbed for multimodal dialog system development and benchmarking.