Abstract: A system may use multiple speech interface devices to interact with a user by speech. All or a portion of the speech interface devices may detect a user utterance and may initiate speech processing to determine a meaning or intent of the utterance. Within the speech processing, arbitration is employed to select one of the multiple speech interface devices to respond to the user utterance. Arbitration may be based in part on metadata that directly or indirectly indicates the proximity of the user to the devices, and the device that is deemed to be nearest the user may be selected to respond to the user utterance.

Abstract: A dialog assistant embodied in a computing system can present a clarification question based on a machine-readable version of human-generated conversational natural language input. Some versions of the dialog assistant identify a clarification target in the machine-readable version, determine a clarification type relating to the clarification target, present the clarification question in a conversational natural language manner, and process a human-generated conversational natural language response to the clarification question.

Abstract: Embodiments of the invention provide systems and methods for recording and handling an absence of an individual according to a multi-tier employment model. According to one embodiment, the method can comprise receiving absence information indicating a period during which an individual will be unavailable. A list of assignments affected by the absence can be generated based on the received absence information, work schedule information, and work assignment information defined in a work assignment tier of the multi-tier employment model. The generated list of assignments can be filtered based on the received absence information and work schedule information for each assignment of the list of assignments. A list of supervisors corresponding to the assignments of the filtered list of assignments can be generated and a notification of the absence can be provided to each of the supervisors in the list of supervisors.