Realizing Complex User Wishes with a Function Planning Module

Summary

Recently, spoken dialogue systems became much more sophisticated and allow for rather complex dialogues. Moreover, the functionality of devices, applications, and services and the amount of digital content increased. Due to the network age (Internet, personal area networks, and so on) the applications one can control or wants to control change dynamically, as does the content. Therefore a dialogue system can no longer be manually designed for one application. Instead, a layer in between is required, which translates the functionalities of the devices such that they can be used via a generic dialogue system and which also resolves complex user wishes according to available applications. In this paper a module, called the function planning module, is described which builds a link between a dialogue system and an ensemble of applications. A planning component searches for the applications necessary to solve a user wish and the sequence of action which has to be performed. A formal description of the function planning module and its successful integration in the SmartKom prototype system are presented in this paper as well.