In this paper, the August spoken dialogue system is described. This experimental Swedish
dialogue system, which featured an animated talking agent, was exposed to the general public
during a trial period of six months. The construction of the system was partly motivated by
the need to collect genuine speech data from people with little or no previous experience of
spoken dialogue systems. A corpus of more than 10,000 utterances of spontaneous computer-
directed speech was collected and empirical linguistic analyses were carried out. Acoustical,
lexical and syntactical aspects of this data were examined. In particular, user behavior and
user adaptation during error resolution were emphasized. Repetitive sequences in the database
were analyzed in detail. Results suggest that computer-directed speech during error resolution
is increased in duration, hyperarticulated and contains inserted pauses. Design decisions which
may have influenced how the users behaved when they interacted with August are discussed
and implications for the development of future systems are outlined.