Goal

To connect the Talkamatic Dialogue Manager (TDM) to a commercially available dialogue systems infrastructure, such as Microsoft's Cortana, Nuance Mix, Wit.ai, or IBM Watson, and evaluate the resulting hybrid platform in terms of usability for app designers and end users.

Background

Voice interfaces give users the possibility to interact with a device without using their eyes or hands. In recent years, several commercial platforms for dialogue systems have been released by major players in the field. In most of these platforms, the focus has been on high quality speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU), while the dialogue management (DM) and natural language generation (NLG) components are less developed. Fortunately, DM and NLG are exactly the strengths of TDM, and so the integration of TDM with other commercial platforms is an attractive venue to explore.

Problem description

The overall goal is to integrate TDM with an available infrastructure in a way that (1) allow developers to build new applications as easily as possible, without the need for "doing the same thing twice" despite working on a hybrid platform, and (2) allows users of the commercial dialogue systems platform in question to get full access to the advanced dialogue capabilities of TDM, and if possible also the multilingual and multimodal features of TDM.

• Read up on TDM functionality and APIs
• Read up on the (non-TDM) commercial dialogue systems platform selected
• Draw up a plan for integration, with regard to both development and deployment requirements
• Implement the integration
• Evaluate the integrated platform with respect to development and deployment

Recommended background knowledge

• Python
• XML

Supervisors

Staffan Larsson, FLoV, together with Talkamatic AB. Talkamatic is a university research spin-off company based in Göteborg.