This paper gives an overview of our spoken dialogue system, which is designed to meet four objectives, Portability, Usability, Robustness, and Extensibility (PURE). First, an integrated scoring function is proposed so that all components of the spoken dialogue system can be properly integrated, and information from all components can be considered jointly to resolve ambiguities. Moreover, instead of shallow analysis or simply keyword/key‐phrase matching, deeper analysis is conducted by incorporating robust parsing, error recovery and semantic analysis to improve discrimination and robustness of the language understanding component. To achieve PURE design of dialogue management, a domain transparent framework is also proposed in this paper. Results and experiences we got from building systems of various domains showed very encouraging results.