TRENDS, CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN SPOKEN DIALOGUE RESEARCH

Spoken dialogue technology has developed considerably over the past thirty years both in terms of research activity as well as in terms of commercially deployed applications. This chapter presents an overview of trends in dialogue research based on an analysis of papers that were presented at Eurospeech-Interspeech conferences in 1989, 1999, and 2009. Following this some challenges are identified, in particular, the issues faced by individual researchers and those in small groups who wish to build viable end-to-end dialogue systems and the difficulties that are often encountered by academic researchers when trying to access the many resources and toolkits that are required for dialogue research. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some opportunities for future research, including the integration of dialogue technology into voice search applications and the application of spoken dialogue technology in ambient intelligence environments.