Recent technological advances allow for building real-time, inter-active
multi-modal dialog systems for a wide variety of applications
ranging from information systems to communication systems interacting with
back-end services. To retrieve or update information from various
information systems the user has to interact among other
man-machine-interfaces (simultaneously) with speech dialog
systems. This will inevitably lead a situation where a user has to
interact with multiple speech dialog systems within a single thread of
activity. Exposing the users to such an environment with diverse speech
interfaces will result in increased cognitive load and thus bad usability.
An integrated speech enabled access layer to all available information
from different applications would allow the user to access information
more efficiently and easily.
This dissertation proposes a novel approach to build such an integrated
speech user interface to different applications by combining the existing
speech user interfaces of different applications automatically or
semi-automatically. By analyzing the dialog specifications of different
applications, functional and semantic overlaps between the applications
are recognized. The overlaps are solved successfully in the level of
dialog specification so that the integrated speech user interface provides
transparent access to different applications, solves the problems of task
sharing and enables information sharing among different applications.