An interactive environment for dialogue development: its design, use and evaluation; or, is aide useful?

Abstract

The Author's Interactive Dialogue Environment (AIDE) of the Dialogue Management System is an integrated set of direct manipulation tools used by a dialogue author to design and implement human-computer interfaces without writing source code. This paper presents the conceptual dialogue transaction model upon which AIDE is based, describes AIDE, and illustrates how a dialogue author develops an interface using AIDE. A preliminary empirical evaluation of the use of AIDE versus the use of a programming language to implement an interface shows very encouraging results.