Over the last five years, three technological advances have cooperated to push speech enabled dialogue systems back into the limelight: the availability of robust real time speech recognition tools, the explosion of Internet accessible information sources, and the proliferation of mobile information access devices such as cell phones. However, the systems being fielded, and the standards arising from these efforts, represent only a limited set of capabilities for robust voice enabled interaction with knowledge sources. These limitations arise partly from limitations of technology, but also significantly from dialog systems being based on closed, proprietary architectures and software.

The DARPA Communicator program is exploring how to engage human users in robust, mixed initiative speech dialogue interactions that reach beyond current capabilities in dialog systems. To support this exploration, the Communicator program has funded the development of a non-proprietary, distributed message-passing architecture for dialogue systems, as well as its implementation as an open source infrastructure. In this presentation, we describe the features of the Galaxy Communicator System Infrastructure (GCSI), and of how the Communicator program and dialog system community benefit from open source software licensing.