generating voice and palm-top dialogs from a common model?

Roni,

Hope this is not too late to catch you before ACL is over.

At the recent meeting of the INCITS V2 Standards committee, Brad Myers
stated that in your Universal Speech Interface work you have been
auto-generating speech interfaces from a reference model of the interaction
logic which is expressed in the 'specification' format developed under the
Personal Universal Controller activity related to the Pittsburgh Pebbles 
project.

This is very exciting news.

Under the aegis of the Web Accessibility Initiative, the Protocols and
Formats Working Group <http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF> has been leaning on the
XForms Working Group and the Voice Browsing Working Group to demonstrate
that they have, or are working toward by a clear roadmap, a specification 
for a model class that would serve as a single-source authoring basis for 
both voice and more visual forms-mode interactions.

Your work sounds like a new high-watermark in terms of demonstrating that
this can be done, and how.  But I may be interpreting it over optimistically.

This has radical implications for Web Services and how Device Independent
the W3C Multimodal Interaction work product can be.

 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2002AprJun/0057.html

For accessibility purposes, it would be extremely valuable if "what you
need to capture by way of interaction logic" were proven in multi-binding
experiments and captured into a "take home and build" realization such as
the XML syntax from the PUC project.

This could be a major factor (aspect) of the specification of a "universally
accessible" representation for Web Services.

Some of the questions I haven't been able to answer from a quick scan of your
home page are:

* Is there somewhere a writeup that summarizes the commonality between the
technology-utilization profiles employed in the running code for USI and PUC?

* Are you just re-using the abstract form, the language specification of the 
PUC 'specification' format, or have you been generating Voice interfaces 
_from 'specification' instances_ developed in the PUC context without 
editing the 'specification' instance?

I think that those two questions show the general direction of our interest.
Let me stop there for now.

Also, if you can possibly connect with Debbie Dahl while you are at ACL (presuming
that you will be there) please connect with her so she understands the answers
to the above questions, even if a review isn't available instantly on a public, 
WCAG1.0-AAA-accessible-HTML web page.  Debbie is chairing the Multimedia Interaction
Working Group within W3C and has a strong Voice background, so she will be a 
quick study.

Al

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2002 12:18:39 UTC