The design of a spoken language interface

Fast and accurate speech recognition systems ystems bring with them the possibility of designing effective voice driven applica-tions. Efforts to this date have involved the construction of monolithic systems, necessitating repetition of effort as each new system is implemented. In this paper, we describe an initial implementation of a general spoken language interface, the Carnegie Mellon Spoken Language Shell (CM-SLS) which provides voice interface services to a variable number of applica-tions running on the same computer. We also present a system built using CM-SLS, the Office Manager, which provides the user with voice access to facilities uch as an appointment calendar, a personal database, and voice mail. Speech interfaces need to provide services that are par-ticular to speech, either due to the intrinsic properties of speech or due to the characteristics of cur~nt recognitio