  We present a new approach to dialogue specification for Virtual Personal
Assistants (VPAs) based on so-called dialogue workflow graphs, with several
demonstrated advantages over current ontology-based methods. Our new dialogue
specification language (DSL) enables customers to more easily participate in
the VPA modeling process due to a user-friendly modeling framework. Resulting
models are also significantly more compact. VPAs can be developed much more
rapidly. The DSL is a new modeling layer on top of our ontology-based Dialogue
Management (DM) framework OntoVPA. We explain the rationale and benefits behind
the new language and support our claims with concrete reduced Level-of-Effort
(LOE) numbers from two recent OntoVPA projects.
