Prosody Tutorial: Lecture 25: Dialog Systems

This is Lecture 25 of our series on prosody. In recent years spoken dialog systems, smart speakers, intelligent agents, and their cousins have seen wide acceptance, but only in certain domains. Going component by component, we explain how better use of prosody may dramatically improve the usability of spoken dialog systems. Yet future systems, with super-human prosodic abilities, will pose societal risks. 00:00 Towards Truly Interactive Dialog Systems 01:06 Limitations of Current Systems 03:15 Typical Architecture of a Dialog System 04:03 Speech Synthesis and Speech Recognition, revisited 04:49 Turn-Taking and other Reactive Behaviors 05:40 Sensitively Tracking the User's State 07:14 Clearly Conveying the System's State 08:56 Challenges in Scaling Up 11:03 Societal Risks