Can we use a spoken dialogue system to document endangered languages?

This paper investigates using a dialogue system to preserve endangered languages, and the viability of a multilingual dialogue system to generate a general use corpus of audio responses in . We introduce DAPEL (Dialogue APP for Endangered Languages). DAPEL elicits responses from speakers of endangered languages by having a conversation with them. We conducted a pilot user study to examine the efficacy of using an automated system like DAPEL versus a human interviewer. We also studied the effects of engaging in small-talk in a different language in between recording prompts for the target language.