New approaches are needed to develop effective conversational speech interfaces. Vassos discusses multichannel, natural language understanding dialogue management based on a purely declarative, channel-agnostic dialogue model, which enables the realization of the “develop once, deploy everywhere” concept. Thomson summarizes work by the AVIOS Advanced Dialog Forum to minimize development cost, distribute dialogue control in a multimodal environment, and build cross-industry and industry/academia collaboration. The presentation will include a demo and links so audience members can experiment with some of the solutions presented.