This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Today's spoken dialogue systems (SDS) enable limited verbal communication between humans and machines. DialRC serves the whole SDS community with training, data, a common research platform and a challenge in order to push its results to the next level. DialRC coordinates workshops and tutorials for new and for advanced researchers, provides large amounts of data from deployed SDS, offers a platform where studies can be run and manages a challenge where research can be compared. A novel aspect of DialRC is the access to large quantities of real users. This translates into SDS that can be better adapted to real world conditions and thus to more natural and efficient communication. Coordinated challenges in other areas have helped focus research efforts and provided comparisons of techniques in one same environment. The result of these challenges has been a dramatic increase in findings in the area. DialRC's Spoken Dialogue Challenge will afford the same changes in the SDS domain. DialRC is a central point of exchange of information, software, experimental techniques and data. It is transforming American research into a highly competitive and innovative force for human interaction with machines. Due to the coordinated and wide-reaching services that DialRC offers, SDS researchers are now able to improve information access for everyman. www.dialrc.org
