This tutorial will give a practical description of the free software Carnegie Mellon Olympus 2 Spoken Dialog Architecture. Building real working dialog systems that are robust enough for the general public to use is difficult. Most frequently, the functionality of the conversations is severely limited down to simple question-answer pairs. While offthe-shelf toolkits help the development of such simple systems, they do not support more advanced, natural dialogs nor do they offer the transparency and flexibility required by computational linguistic researchers. .
