VIENNA, 12 October 2001: SAIL LABS Technology today launched its Conversational System Application Development Kit (ADK) 1.0.2, an upgrade version of the powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the award-winning SAIL LABS Conversational System technology. The new ADK 1.0.2 features a more streamlined GUI and improved documentation, both of which enable rapid and effective application development.

The Conversational System is a Natural Language Understanding (NLU)-based dialog system that serves as a voice interface to a wide variety of content. Its pure, statistics-based NLU environment is a tremendous advance on traditional grammar-based dialog systems, and gives the Conversational System the ability to hold free-flowing, intention-seeking conversations.

With the Conversational System ADK, developers have an IDE for building and integrating DialogXML applications into the pure Java environment of the Conversational System. Within the framework of an intuitive GUI, the ADK provides all the tools required to build, compile and test the various application components. Application files are automatically organized into the required sub-folders, and all mandatory files are automatically created with base content.

Developers can create application prototypes rapidly, and, as a result, functioning applications can be built within a matter of weeks. Further refinement can be achieved, on an ongoing basis, through the ADK’s training-by-example capabilities. For businesses, this means that applications can be deployed quickly, thus dramatically reducing the time to investment payoff.

In the upgrade version, the ADK GUI has been streamlined for smoother integration of applications into the Conversational System.

Also, the documentation has been improved in scope as well as in depth. The linguistic theory required for the development of Conversational System applications is explained in detail, the DialogXML specifications used in the system’s program code and all programming constructs are discussed with the help of examples, and the ADK’s various features and tools are fully described. The documentation also provides a wealth of practical information and useful tips for each stage of the development process.

The main features of the Conversational System ADK 1.0.2 are summarized below:

• Specialist tools for developing language and NLU models;

• A GUI interface that creates and tracks all application files and provides access to all required development tools;

• Offline testing of the application, component-by-component;

• Extensive and detailed logging services, which enhance diagnostics capability.