2.2.1 Why Extending FSA?

The kind of dialogue that the automaton we've just seen allows is only an abstraction of the expected dialogues.

The kind of dialogue that the automaton we've just seen allows is only an abstraction of the expected dialogues. It covers so few of the characteristics that make dialogue an efficient way of communicating that it almost defeats the purpose of using dialogue at all. A drop-down menu would probably be equally efficient.

Let us see, then, what a programmer has to do in order to extend a FSA dialogue manager in order to encapsulate the dialogue characteristics considered in Section 1.1.2. We will do that by looking at an example, namely, handling grounding.

So let's look at the possibilities of extending the simple automaton in Section 2.1.2 to cover different forms of grounding. Due to the low performance of the state of the art speech recognisers, it is absolutely necessary for a system to model this feature in order to prevent irrecoverable errors.