The Syrinx Spoken Language System

This paper describes the Syrinx Spoken Language System (Sylan), an automated dialogue system that is fully integrated with the Syrinx Large Vocabulary Speech Recogniser (Sycon) into the Syrinx SpeechMaster platform. This platform combines speech recognition, natural language processing, dialogue management, telephony and database integration into a robust and flexible Voice User Interface that permits the deployment of natural language dialogue systems in automated call centres. We first describe the architecture of Sylan which, being modular, allows us to build a system whose domain-independent components are reusable from application to application. We then present those components from the point of view of application developers, describing the data structures used by the system and the utilities to build them. The two prototypes that have already been developed using Sylan are briefly presented, and we conclude by drawing the lessons learned along the way and pointing to further research directions.