Spoken Dialogue Systems are computer-based systems developed to provide information and carry out simple tasks using speech as the interaction mode. Examples include travel information and reservation, weather forecast information, directory information and product order. Multimodal Dialogue Systems aim to overcome the limitations of spoken dialogue systems which use speech as the only communication means, while Multilingual Systems allow interaction with users that speak different languages.

• Presents a clear snapshot of the structure of a standard dialogue system, by addressing its key components in the context of multilingual and multimodal interaction and the assessment of spoken, multilingual and multimodal systems
• In addition to the fundamentals of the technologies employed, the development and evaluation of these systems are described
• Highlights recent advances in the practical application of spoken dialogue systems

This comprehensive overview is a must for graduate students and academics in the fields of speech recognition, speech synthesis, speech processing, language, and human–computer interaction technolgy. It will also prove to be a valuable resource to system developers working in these areas.