Two-way Chatbot Speech in the lab

We've just finished our initial tests of using our chatbots with Dragon's Naturally Speaking voice recognition software and are pleased to report that the tests worked well. Having a two-way spoken natural language conversation with a chatbot was a bit spine-tingling but it works. As ever there's a long way to go to reach total fluency and accuracy, but for users with impaired sight this opens up a whole new range of possibilities. One point of note was that the chatbot handled the Dragon software's misspelling pretty well, because we use a mixture of keyword and pattern detection. As long as one or two keywords are OK it doesn't matter too much what else is aid. A pure pattern based chatbot such as one based on AIML or a learning algorithm probably would not have fared as well. We'll keep you posted on developments.