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Interaction with an information database

Spoken dialogue systems  are useful for accessing data from telephones. The data may be local or remote. The implementation of the application should account for this, as accessing databases (particularly if they are remote) has an effect on system response time  and also on the cooperativeness of the application: there is no need to access the database if in the previous call an identical query showed that the information requested is not available. The application developer has to know how to take into consideration the peculiarities of his application; for example, it may concern information retrieval from databases with no reasoning involved, or interactive problem solving with complex reasoning.

In designing the application, depending on the technology provided, some data may be available on the local system and should be downloaded from the remote-host in order to minimise the number of accesses to the host; others data may be remote.




EAGLES SWLG SoftEdition, May 1997. Get the book...