Improving speech interaction with mixed initiative dialogue Loquendo SDS - Spoken Dialog System

The transition from system-directed to mixed-initiative human-machine dialogue has been a focus of several research institutes and industries during the past several years [4,5]. The term “mixedinitiative” was introduced in the artificial intelligence literature by Jaime Carbonell, who described a prototype that “is capable of maintaining a mixed initiative dialogue with the student, with questions asked by either side and answered by the other” [3]. A similar definition is proposed by Balentine and Morgan: they write that, the term “mixed-initiative” identifies “a dialogue in which interactions are sometimes initiated by the users and sometimes by the machine” [1], but that smooth turn-taking is still difficult, and not yet fully realized.