Spoken dialogue system design-the influence of the organisational context on the design process

Most of the currently available speech recognition systems were designed by speech recognition and dialogue experts for clients giving varying degrees of input. In this paper we report on experience gained in reversing this principle of the design process, i.e. dialogue systems are designed by clients with technical assistance from speech recognition experts. This approach was taken in the EC Language Engineering project REWARD which is concerned with enabling experts in a target domain area with very little or no speech recognition experience to design telephone services which use advanced speech recognition technology. The discussion of the organisational impact on the design process makes use of design life cycle analyses carried out in the ESPRIT 4th Framework LTR Concerted Action Project DISC