Toward Conversational Human-Computer Interaction

The belief that humans will be able to interact with computers in conversational speech has long been a favorite subject in science fiction, reflecting the persistent belief that spoken dialogue would be the most natural and powerful user interface to computers. With recent improvements in computer technology and in speech and language processing, such systems are starting to appear feasible. There are significant technical problems that still need to be solved before speech-driven interfaces become truly conversational. This article describes the results of a 10-year effort building robust spoken dialogue systems at the University of Rochester.