Detecting barge-in in a speech dialogue system

A computer-readable medium that can be loaded into the internal memory of a computer system, said computer-readable medium comprising software code portions that, when executed on the computer system, perform steps comprising:

• determining whether a speech prompt is being output by the speech dialogue system;
• and
• detecting whether speech activity is present in an input signal based on a time-varying sensitivity threshold and/or based on speaker information,
• where the sensitivity threshold is increased if it is determined that a speech prompt is being output and decreased if it is determined that no output of a speech prompt is being output.

A speech dialogue system configured to detect barge-in, the speech dialogue system comprising:

• a prompter operationally enabled to output one or more speech prompts from the speech dialogue system;
• and
• a speech activity detector for detecting speech activity in an input signal based on a time-varying sensitivity threshold and/or based on speaker information,
• where the sensitivity threshold of the speech activity detector is increased if output of a speech prompt is determined and decreased if no output of a speech prompt is determined.