Executive Summary

AT&T recognizes the crucial role of standards in the creation and deployment of next generation services supporting more natural and effective interaction through spoken and multimodal interfaces, and continues to be a firm supporter of W3C's activities in the area of spoken and multimodal standards. As a participating member of the W3C Multimodal Interaction working group, AT&T welcomes the Extensible Multimodal Annotation (EMMA) 1.0 Candidate Recommendation.

EMMA 1.0 provides a detailed language for capturing the range of possible interpretations of multimodal inputs and their associated metadata through a full range of input processing stages, from recognition, through understanding and integration, to dialog management. The creation of a common standard for the representation of multimodal inputs is critical in enabling rapid prototyping of multimodal applications, facilitating interoperation of components from different vendors, and enabling effective logging and archiving of multimodal interactions.

AT&T is very happy to contribute to the further progress of the emerging EMMA standard by submitting an EMMA 1.0 implementation report. EMMA 1.0 results are already available from an AT&T EMMA server which is currently being used in the development of numerous multimodal prototypes and trial services.

AT&T considers emma:group an important feature for capturing multimodal inputs and intends to include this in future implementations. This feature was not relevant for the EMMA implementation described in this report. AT&T considers emma:group-info an important feature for capturing multimodal inputs and intends to include this in future implementations. This feature was not relevant for the EMMA implementation described in this report. AT&T considers emma:sequence an important feature for representing sequences of gestured input and intends to include this in future implementations. This feature was not relevant for the EMMA implementation described in this report. emma:literal proved useful both for literal semantic results and for raw results from speech recognition. This feature is under consideration for future implementations of language understanding and multimodal integration. emma:time-ref-uri feature under consideration for future implementations. emma:time-ref-anchor feature under consideration for future implementations. emma:offset-to-start feature under consideration for future implementations. AT&T considers this feature important for implementations of multimodal integration.