US 8,046,227 B2Granted

Development system for a dialog system

AssigneeTelestra Corporation Limited

InventorBradford Craig Starkie

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Abstract

A development system, including a scenario generator for generating a plurality of sample interactions representative of interactions between a dialog system and a user of the dialog system on the basis of definition data for the dialog system. The definition data includes state machine code, prompt data, and recognition data. A simulator generates prompts of sample interactions on the basis of the prompt data, and the scenario generator generates responses to the prompts on the basis of the recognition data. A scenario editor allows a user to modify the sample interactions. A grammar learner then updates the prompt data and the recognition data on the basis of the modified sample interactions. An application builder generates the definition data from specification data provided by a developer, an application template, and/or an existing dialog application.

Claims29

Dependent claims

A process for developing a dialog application for an interactive voice response system and executed by a computer system, comprising:

accessing application specification data for the dialog application, the application specification data defining tasks performed by the dialog application, items of information needed for the tasks, and information created by executing the tasks;
processing the application specification data to generate application definition data defining a dialog state machine, recognition grammars, and prompt grammars for the dialog application;
processing the application definition data to generate a plurality of example interactions representative of interactions between said dialog application and a user of said dialog application, wherein the plurality of the example interactions includes at least one example of a possible prompt corresponding to each rule of a plurality of rules of the prompt grammars, and at least one example of a possible user response corresponding to each rule of a plurality of rules of the recognition grammars;
providing the generated example interactions to a user for modification;
receiving the modified example interactions from the user;
processing the modified example interactions to update the recognition grammar, the prompt grammar, and the state machine;
generating the dialog application from the updated state machine and the updated recognition grammars and the updated prompt grammars;
and
storing the generated dialog application in a memory device.

6 more elements

A development system for developing a dialog application for an interactive voice response system, and comprising:

an application builder configured to process application specification data defining tasks performed by the dialog application, items of information needed for the tasks, and information created by executing the tasks to generate application definition data defining a dialog state machine, recognition grammars, and prompt grammars for the dialog application;
a scenario generator configured to process the application definition data to a plurality of example interactions representative of interactions between said dialog application and a user of said dialog application, wherein the plurality of the example interactions includes at least one example of a possible prompt corresponding to each rule of a plurality of rules of the prompt grammars, and at least one example of a possible user response corresponding to each rule of a plurality of rules of the recognition grammars;
a scenario editor including graphical user interface components for modifying said example interactions;
one or more learning components configured to process the modified example interactions to update the recognition grammars, the prompt grammars, and the state machine;
a code generator configured to generate the dialog application from the updated state machine, the updated recognition grammars, and the updated prompt grammars.

2 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.