The belief that dialogue management and user interaction are vital is
supported by a recent experience of ours.  In April 2001, at the
conclusion of the Tongues project
\cite{webpage?}, we carried out a field-test of a STST system running
on a laptop, with regular Army officers and naive Croatian civilians
as users.
While the detailed analysis of the test results is still underway, our
informal observation was that user interaction was clearly the weakest link
\cite{personal-communication?}.  While ASR and TTS were certainly not
perfect, the majority of the failures to complete tasks successfully
were clearly the result of difficulties the monolingual English
speakers had in assessing
whether the (EBMT-based) MT component had produced correct translations
in the target language.  A team member who was bilingual observed that
often the English-to-Croatian translation was reasonably correct, but the
English-speaker would abort the translation because the available feedback
suggested that the translation was not adequate.

