US Patent 7389213 Dialogue flow interpreter development tool

A computer software product is used to create applications for enabling a dialogue between a human and a computer. The software product provides a programming tool that insulates software developers from time-consuming, technically-challenging programming tasks by enabling the developer to specify generalized instructions to a Dialogue Flow Interpreter, which invokes functions to implement a speech application, automatically populating a library with dialogue objects that are available to other applications. The speech applications created through the DFI may be implemented as COM (component object model) objects, and so the applications can be easily integrated into a variety of different platforms. In addition, “translator” object classes are provided to handle specific types of data, such as currency, numeric data, dates, times, string variables, etc. These translator object classes have utility either as part of the DFI library or as a sub-library separate from dialogue implementation.