In this paper we propose the integration of intelligent components technologies (natural language and discourse management) in voice web interfaces to make them smarter. We describe how we have integrated reusable components of dialogue management and language processing in a multilingual voice system to improve its friendliness and portability. The dialogue management component deals with complex dialogue phenomena, such as user-initiative dialogues, and follows the information state-based theory. The resulting dialogue system supports friendly communication (through the telephone and the web) in several languages: English, Spanish, Catalan and Italian. The dialogue system has been adapted to guide the users to access online public administration services.

This paper describes the evaluation of the FAME interlingua-based speech-to-speech translation system for Catalan, English and Spanish. This system is an extension of the already existing NESPOLE! that translates between English, French, German and Italian. This article begins with a brief introduction followed by a description of the system architecture and the components of the translation module including the Speech Recognizer, the analysis chain, the generation chain and the Speech Synthesizer. Then we explain the interlingua formalism used, called Interchange Format (IF). We show the results obtained from the evaluation of the system and we describe the three types of evaluation done. We also compare the results of our system with those obtained by a stochastic translator which has been independently developed over the course of the FAME project. Finally, we conclude with future work.