[Communicator-user] CMU Open Source Spoken Dialog Toolkit

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

			A N N O U N C I N G
				the
			  Carnegie Mellon
			    Open Source
		  Communicator Spoken Dialog Toolkit

We are pleased to announce the initial release of the Open Source
Communicator Spoken Dialog Toolkit (CSDTk). The Toolkit contains all
necessary components for building and deploying advanced spoken
language dialog systems, for both desktop and telephony
applications. The system is freely available for download at
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/Communicator/ You can try out the
telephone-based Travel Planning system at +1 877 CMU-PLAN (268-7526).

The Carnegie Mellon Communicator Toolkit is based on the CMU
Communicator, a top-performing advanced dialog system developed as
part of the DARPA Communicator program. It is distributed with a
working implementation for a Travel Planning domain. CSDTk is built
on top of the open source Galaxy Communicator Software Infrastructure.

As distributed, the CSDTk operates in desktop mode. With the addition
of suitable hardware it can be connected to, and used over, the
telephone system.

The CSDTk incorporates the following major components:

- Sphinx II decoder(*), with automatic endpointing and barge-in
management. Sphinx is a speaker-independent, large-vocabulary
recognizer. The distribution includes acoustic, lexical and language
models for the Travel Planning domain.

- Phoenix semantic parser(*). With Travel Planning semantic grammar.

- Helios post-parser, including understanding confidence management.

- AGENDA Dialog Engine, including handler objects for Travel Planning.

- DateTime understanding module

- Travel back-end, including live access to airline and hotel
information for about 500 destinations world-wide.

- Rosetta language generation module, including the CMU Stochastic
Generation Engine.

- Festival(*) text-to-speech synthesizer, with Travel Planning voice database.

The systems in modules marked (*) are already available as separate
distributions. However, the Toolkit distribution includes versions
with interfaces specifically designed for the Toolkit.

Note that in addition to the CSDTk software you will need to install Perl
and a database server, such as MySQL. The initial distribution is for
Windows.

For information about the CSDTk, please contact Yitao Sun
(yi...@cs...). For general information about the Carnegie Mellon
Communicator project, please contact Alex Rudnicky (ai...@cs...).