Spoken dialog system framework supporting multiple concurrent sessions

Spoken dialog systems are becoming increasingly popular to provide information to people. Different frameworks are available that provide the necessary infrastructure to develop a dialog system for any domain and language. The support for multiple concurrent sessions is a major requirement of real-world dialog systems. This paper proposes a framework that supports multiple concurrent sessions for developing dialog systems. The framework uses Galaxy's hub and spoke architecture for communication and Olympus' RavenClaw dialog manager to make use of its domain independent dialog engine. The paper describes the design of a Session Manager module that handles multiple concurrent sessions. The proposed framework has been implemented and tested on a real-world spoken dialog system which can handle ten concurrent sessions. The proposed framework performs well for multiple sessions and may be used to develop commercial scale dialog systems.