Handbook of Multimodal and Spoken Dialogue Systems

Dictation systems, read-aloud software for the blind, speech control of machinery, geographical information systems with speech input and output, and educational software with "talking head" artificial tutorial agents are already on the market. The field is expanding rapidly, and new methods and applications emerge almost daily. But good sources of systematic information have not kept pace with the body of information needed for development and evaluation of these systems. Much of this information is widely scattered through speech and acoustic engineering, linguistics, phonetics, and experimental psychology. This text presents best practice in resource creation for speech input/output software and hardware. It brings experts in these fields together to give detailed "how to" information and recommendations on planning spoken dialogue systems, designing and evaluating audiovisual and multimodal systems, and evaluating consumer off-the-shelf products. Included is a fully searchable CD-ROM containing a hypertext version of the book in HTML format for fast look-up of specific points, convenient desktop use, and lightweight mobile reference; and a systematic medium-scale compendium of terminology with definitions.