Spoken Dialogue in Virtual Worlds

Human-computer conversations have attracted a great deal
of interest especially in virtual worlds. In fact, research gave rise to spoken dialogue systems by taking advantage of speech recognition, language understanding and speech synthesis advances. This work surveys
the state of the art of speech dialogue systems. Current dialogue system
technologies and approaches are first introduced emphasizing differences
between them, then, speech recognition and synthesis and language understanding are introduced as complementary and necessary modules.
On the other hand, as the development of spoken dialogue systems becomes more complex, it is necessary to define some processes to evaluate
their performance. Wizard-of-Oz techniques play an important role to
achieve this task. Thanks to this technique is obtained a suitable dialogue corpus necessary to achieve good performance. A description of
this technique is given in this work together with perspectives on multimodal dialogue systems in virtual worlds.