Dialogue Management: Support for Dialogue Independence

Dialogue management involves the application of systems in the design and delivery of user-system dialogues. This article describes a dialogue management environment that is based on a concept of dialogue independence: the separation of dialogue definition form dialogue execution. In this environment, software facilities provide building blocks for design and delivery of dialogues that are consistent, efficient, shareable, and portable. The environment supports multiple workstation and communication protocol environments. This environment is compared to those emerging in homogeneous hardware environments such as HyperCard.