We report on a method for utilising corpora collected in natural settings. It is based on distilling re-writing natural dialogues to elicit the type of dialogue that would occur if one the dialogue participants was a computer instead of a human. The method isa complementto other meanssuch as Wizard of Oz-studies and un-distilled natural dialogues. We present the distilling method and guidelines for distillation. We also illustrate how the method affects a corpus of dialogues and discuss the pros and cons of three approaches in di erent phases of dialogue systems development.