It's Only Natural: Evaluating Natural Language Dialogs Your
decision on whether to use a natural dialog approach instead of
a directed dialog in an IVR application will directly affect the
cost, effort and maintenance of the system. This article will
give you a process that you can use to make the right decision.
Natural Dialogs versus Directed Dialogs A natural dialog is one
in which the prompts, grammars and dialog flow are modeled and
designed to more closely simulate a real conversation between
two people. Natural dialogs allow the human to participate in
controlling the dialog flow. Directed dialogs on the other hand
use a pre-defined set of steps and usually occur in a
sequential, linear fashion. Directed dialogs are modeled in a
dialog-flow fashion, similar to a call-flow for touch tone IVRs.
Natural dialogs, on the other hand, typically utilize a finite
state model where dialogs are executed based on the state of one
or more variables. There isn't a clear dividing line between
directed dialogs and nat