BBN Technologies

At BBN, we have been developing interactive human-machine systems that can understand the human voice. Our dialog work uses statistical speech recognition and natural language understanding to enable "mixed initiative" dialogs, in which the user does not have to answer a rigid set of questions asked by the system, but can speak more conversationally. One such interactive system is Talk'n'Travel, a system that assists a human user in scheduling a trip that can have multiple legs. The system negotiates with the user when the user's constraints on a flight cannot all be met.