Interaction of units in a unit selection database
Mark Beutnagel, Alistair Conkie · 1999
This paper describes the Swedish spoken dialogue system August. This system has been used to collect spontaneous speech data, largely from people with no previous experience of speech technology or computers. The aim was to be able to analyse how novice users interact with a multi-modal information kiosk, placed without supervision in a public location. The system described in this paper featured an animated talking agent, August. Speech data was collected during the six months that the system was exposed to the general public. The system and its components are briefly described, with references to more detailed papers. Keywords: multi-modal dialogue system, talking head 1. INTRODUCTION Future dialogue systems will not only be accessed through the telephone or via the Internet. Nor will they be used only in laboratories by expert personnel. The future systems should be easy to use for people with little or no experience of computers. Speech technology promises to offer user-friendly ...