Re: [Communicator-user] Communicator and VoiceXML?

[Alex R. <ai...@cs...>]

Carnegie Mellon hosts an Open Source VXML intepreter, OpenVXI.
This is code that was originally created, and put into open source, by 
SpeechWorks.
Details at http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/openvxi/
There is an active user community, at least to judge from the mailing list.

CMU has an ongoing effort to integrate Sphinx and Festival with OpenVXI to 
produce a complete standalone package capable of supporting vxml-based 
dialog system authoring. While there is no current effort to combine 
OpenVXI with the Carnegie Mellon Communicator architecture, one reason to 
do so might be the opportunity to exploit the run-time resource management 
in Galaxy.

As to the relationship between OpenVXI and Communicator, I would tend to 
agree that they are in some sense complimentary. Probably a good way to 
think about it is that Communicator provides an exploded view of a dialog 
system, allowing the developer to work on what are nominally the component 
stages (understanding, dialog management, generation, etc.) of dialog; a 
vxml-based system conflates such components into a single representation.

 From another perspective, there are serious limitations to state-based 
representations of dialog, particularly for more complex tasks such as 
Communicator's Travel Planning domain (we know this from experience, as we 
first implemented script-based dialog management then had to replace it 
with a more flexible architecture, Agenda).

Alex Rudnicky


At 09:55 AM 2/13/2002 +0100, Peter Gober wrote:
>Hi all -
>
>the whole voice community talks about VoiceXML nowadays.
>
>As somebody already also pointed out, I see the Communicator and VoiceXML as
>being complementary: Though in principle it is possible to define a voice
>dialog with the Communicators' hub scripting language, you will typically
>want something more focussed for that task. (That's why the CSLR travel demo
>has a "dialog server".) VoiceXML seems to be predestinated for defining a
>dialog. On the other hand, one major strength of the Communicator lies in
>efficiently and flexibly connecting different components together.
>
>Another thing is politics: People, who give you money, tend to ask for
>buzzwords, that they have recently read in large letters on some magazine
>cover. So I am convinced that it would be advantageous for the Communicator
>to be describable as a "superset" of VoiceXML.
>
>So, I think it would be very nice to have a kind of VoiceXML based dialog
>server for the Communicator. (Actually, I found a presentation from Sam from
>October 2000, where he suggested such a thing.)
>
>Does anybody work on that or plans to do so?
>
>Regards -
>
>Peter
>
>--
>*-) Peter Gober
>*-) FOKUS - Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems
>*-) Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 31
>*-) 10589 Berlin, Germany
>*-) phone: +49 30 3463-7347
>*-) email: go...@fo...
>*-) http://www.fokus.fhg.de/research/cc/cats
>
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