Dialog system

A dialogue system, or conversational agent (CA), is a computer system intended to converse with a human. Dialogue systems employed one or more of text, speech, graphics, haptics, gestures, and other modes for communication on both the input and output channel. A dialogue system, or conversational agent (CA), is a computer system intended to converse with a human. Dialogue systems employed one or more of text, speech, graphics, haptics, gestures, and other modes for communication on both the input and output channel. The elements of a dialogue system are not defined. The typical GUI wizard engages in a sort of dialog, but it includes very few of the common dialogue system components, and dialog state is trivial. After dialogue systems based only on written text processing starting from the early Sixties, the first speaking dialogue system was issued by the DARPA Project in the USA in 1977. After the end of this 5-year project, some European projects issued the first dialogue system able to speak many languages (also French, German and Italian). Those first systems were used in the telecom industry to provide phone various services in specific domains, e.g. automated agenda and train tables service. What sets of components are included in a dialogue system, and how those components divide up responsibilities differs from system to system. Principal to any dialogue system is the dialog manager, which is a component that manages the state of the dialog, and dialog strategy. A typical activity cycle in a dialogue system contains the following phases: