CS 224S/LINGUIST 281   -     Winter 2006 Homework 6: Dialogue Agents

This homework based on extending a suggestion by Mike Cohen.

WARNING: Please read this entire page before you start!!!!!

Today's homework is on spoken language dialog systems. You are going to use "BeVocal Cafe".

This homework is REALLY EASY. It is really easy because I would rather you be spending time on your projects now!!!

1. OK. First, familiarize yourself with BeVocal, the idea of VoiceXML, and the concept of a telephone-based dialog agent.
   1. Go to http://cafe.bevocal.com

   2. Click on the "Getting Started with Cafe" link, which should bring you to http://cafe.bevocal.com/docs/getting_started/index.html

   3. Do everything on this "Getting Started with Cafe" page, including signing up, loggin on, editing a VoiceXML file as they suggest, calling up your modified "hello world" application on the phone, looking at the call log, etc.

   4. Documentation is at http://cafe.bevocal.com/docs/index.html; this will point you at VoiceXML manuals, etc.

   5. Really useful samples of code are at http://cafe.bevocal.com/resources/voicexml_samples/index.html. Poke around at these.

2. Now you should be ready for the homework. Your task is to build a "City Time" application. Users should be able to call this application, give the name of a city or country, and find out the current time in that city or country. Your dialogue system should pick a confirmation strategry to confirm the user's requests. So at the minimum, you need to:
   • Create a 'grammar' of cities and countries that you want to recognize.
   • Know the time zone of each of those cities.
   • Know how to find out the time
   • Know how to use VoiceXML to say times in friendly ways.
   • Allow the user to:
     • Say the city/country they want.
     • Specify whether they want time in 24-hour format or AM/PM format.
   • Confirm the user's choices with them.

3. But feel free to get creative with your City Time application!

4. This assignment requires you to learn a little VoiceXML and requires a little JavaScript. For the few of you who don't know any JavaScript at all, you should be able to figure out the little you need to know by copying code from the libraries I've pointed you at, and of course you can post questions to your classmates on the newsgroup, etc.

5. What to turn in:
   1. Your code
   2. A logfile of your system running through one interesting call. Feel free to clean up the logfile to make it shorter/easier to read.
   3. A description of the confirmation strategy you chose (explicit, implicit, etc etc. see discussion of confirmation strategies in Chapter 19).

6. Hints:
   1. Here are some examples of VoiceXML code for saying dates and times.
   2. Here are some examples of JavaScript code for getting dates and times.