Developing a Conversational In-Car Dialog System

In recent years, an increasing number of new devices have found their way into the cars we drive. Speech-operated devices in particular provide a great service to drivers by minimizing distraction, so that they can keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road. Most current examples of such systems, however, rely on using restricted language and scripted dialog interactions. Speech interfaces in highly stressed settings with large information content call for more flexible dialog with robust, wide-coverage language understanding, and proper responses with right amount of information. We describe an initial effort at addressing flexible and rich dialog in a system with a number of features, such as full spoken language understanding, a multi-threaded dialog manager, dynamic update of information, and organized responses.