Usability of a Speech Centric Multimodal Directory Assistance Service

1 Abstract We present two user evaluations of a speech centric multimodal Directory Assistance (DA) service that has been implemented on an iPAQ. The service combines speech and pen at the input side with text and speech at the output side. The first user experiment was an expert review. Five usability experts judged the initial design of the multimodal DA. Based on their comments a new design was implemented and six naïve users tested this version. Results show that the naïve users are able to combine pen and speech recognition in an intuitive way. Much attention must be paid to the graphical interface that should guide the intuitive use of the multimodal service.