Chester: towards a personal medication advisor.

Dialogue systems for health communication hold out the promise of providing intelligent assistance to patients through natural interfaces that require no training to use. But in order to make the development of such systems cost effective, we must be able to use generic techniques and components which are then specialized as needed to the specific health problem and patient population. In this paper, we describe Chester, a prototype intelligent assistant that interacts with its user via conversational natural spoken language to provide them with information and advice regarding their prescribed medications.