US Patent 7139717 System for dialog management

A spoken dialog system having a dialog management module is disclosed. The dialog management module includes a plurality of dialog motivators for handling various operations during a spoken dialog. The dialog motivators comprise error-handling, disambiguation, assumption, confirmation, missing information, and continuation. The spoken dialog system uses the assumption dialog motivator in either a-priori or a-posteriori modes. A-priori assumption is based on predefined requirements for the call flow and a-posteriori assumption can work with the confirmation dialog motivator to assume the content of received user input and confirm received user input.