Unifying Conversational Multimedia Interfaces for Accessing Network Services Across Communication Devices

This paper investigates architecture and interface design issues in engineering conversational multimedia interfaces for accessing network-based services. In particular, we focus on the problem of providing conversation-capable multimodal, multimedia services that can be accessed from a variety of communication devices and environments (telephones, PDAs, desktops etc) with a “consistent” user experience. The goals are two-fold: (i) provisioning a standards-compliant architecture and (ii) designing interfaces that are adaptive to the access device characteristics. We use a directory assistance application that can be accessed from a telephone, kiosk, desktop or a PDA to illustrate architecture and interface design issues.