How to obey the 7 commandments for natural language dialogue?

In this paper we will describe the design of the dialogue management module for a voice-operated system for car driver information. The literature on designing 'good' user interfaces involving natural language dialogue in general and spoken language in particular abounds with useful guidelines for actual development. We have tried to summarize these guidelines in 7 'commandments'. Trying to obey these 7 commandments when designing a system to be used in 'ordinary' situations is by no means easy. To obey them when designing systems for in-car usage is even more difficult: the noisy environment increases the possibility for speech recognition errors, the driver has to perform several other tasks while communicating with the system, etc. In this paper, we will discuss how these constraints influence the design of the dialogue management module and how the additional requirements fit in with the 7 commandments.