Abstract: In a dialogue structure outputting speech items interrogating an access call while examining subsequently received human speech items for ascertaining an actual transaction instance further outputting speech in accordance with the ascertaining until either attaining a positive transaction result, or otherwise exiting the dialogue in case of failure. In particular, the dialogue is constructed from hierarchically arranged and callable subdialogues constituting respective mutually independent building blocks, which are arranged for generating a particular outcome if a positive result is attained by the subdialogue in question. The subdialogues offer interfaces for mutual coupling with a hierarchically superior subdialogue, so that the overall structure is formed as based on a selection of subdialogues and exclusively based on required partial results by each of the subdialogues in the structure.

Abstract: A transaction system has machine recognition of speech. It has dialogue control fed by the recognition, and speech generation fed by the dialogue control for outputting question and verifier statements from a repertoire set. A human-machine dialogue is executed until the dialogue control has recognized a viable transaction formulation with a plurality of user-provided slot fillers to specify the transaction. Dialogue control builds a directed and loopless status graph with nodes that each have their own slot filler and associated metric, and are interrelated through logic relations. The building can amend a node's metric and under control of conflict detection or lowering of a particular node's metric, discard the node in question and its filler, including of derived nodes and also of one-to-one derival nodes of the discarded node.