WAP-Speech: Deriving Synergy between WAP and the Spoken Dialog Interface

We present a prototype that integrates WAP-based information access with spoken dialog interaction. WAP phone usability is encumbered by keypad entry for typing text, and also by the small screen-size that requires much scrolling during browsing or menu selection. The spoken dialog interface offers a desirable complement whereby commands may be spoken instead of typed, and the dialog design may present a menu hierarchy for user selection. We refer to this integrated interface as WAP-speech. Our prototype system offers two information services on an Enterprise Java Beans platform. (i) The weather information service allows the user to traverse a three-tier menu on the WAP phone to retrieve the weather information of a city. Alternatively, the user may interact with the spoken dialog interface and the requested weather information is pushed to his WAP phone. (ii) The stock alert service allows the user to specify the alert condition for a Java-based software agent to monitor a real-time financial information feed. When the pre-specified condition is met, the alert message is automatically generated and pushed to the user’s WAP phone. Preliminary usability studies indicate that the WAP-speech interface can significantly shorten task completion time when compared to the WAP-only interface. The software agent architecture design is suitable for asynchronous WAP applications, where it performs off-line tasks and generates WAP push messages.