Demonstration of a POMDP Voice Dialer

Jason Williams

Abstract: This is a demonstration of a voice dialer, implemented as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). A real-time graphical display shows the POMDP's probability distribution over different possible dialog states, and shows how system output is generated and selected. The system demonstrated here includes several recent advances, including an action selection mechanism which unifies a hand-crafted controller and reinforcement learning. The voice dialer itself is in use today in AT&T Labs and receives daily calls.