This paper presents an approach to managing spoken dialogues in information services systems. We describe how the approach, based upon a tri-partite model of interaction, addresses the problems of co-operativeness and portability across languages and task domains. This approach has been implemented in the generic dialogue manager of the Sundial dialogue systems. We outline the capabilities of this dialogue manager and describe our testing-methodology.
Keywords: Oral Dialogue, Dialogue Management, Interpretation of Utterances, Cooperative System