A spoken dialog system for coordinating information consumption and exploration

Passive consumption of information is boring in most cases and even painful in some cases, especially when the information content is delivered by employing speech media. The user of a speech-based information delivery system, for example a text-to-speech system, usually cannot interrupt the ongoing information ow, inhibiting her/him to confirm some part of the content, or to pose an inquiry for further information exploration. We argue that a carefully designed spoken dialog system could remedy these undesirable situations, and further enable an enjoyable conversation with the users. The key technologies to realize such an attractive dialog system are: (1) pre-compilation of a dialog plan based on the analysis of a source content, and (2) the dynamic recognition of user's state of understanding and interests. This paper illustrates technical views to implement these functionalities, and discusses a dialog example to exemplify the technical merits of the proposed system.