This paper describes the approach followed in implementing the Dialogue Manager of the continuous speech understanding system developed at Cselt during the last few years. In designing the dialogue strategies we have taken into account the specific goals a dialogue system for speech has to achieve. A Dialogue Manager for a speech application has to be robust enough to maintain an acceptable level of user/system interaction quality even when there are partial or complete failures at the lower levels. We will describe how our Dialogue Manager specific architecture meets these requirements.

Keywords: Oral Dialogue Management, Flexible Dialogue Strategies, Predictions.