Robustness has become a major concern in the realm of Man-Machine communication. The integration of text and speech input and output channels with applications responds to a growing need for user-friendly interfaces. How these interfaces will be able to master the various human factors involved and overcome recognition errors and ambiguities is a crucial issue in their application. Neglecting these new challenges will drastically limit the acceptance of such systems. In this paper we focus on the multimodal man-machine dialogue system PARTNER and present the typology of errors and ambiguities addressed in the system. Finally we discuss our ideas on error avoidance as a necessary complement to error management and present results obtained in the case of a graphic object manipulation tool application.

Keywords: Error recovery, Robustness, Multimodal Dialogue Constraints in the recording of speech data bases.