Semi-Automatic Multimodal User Interface Generation

Multimodal applications are typically developed together with their user interfaces, leading to a tight coupling. Additionally, human-computer interaction is often less considered. This potentially results in a worse user interface when additional modalities have to be integrated and/or the application shall be developed for a different device. A promising way of creating multimodal user interfaces with less effort for applications running on several devices is semi-automatic generation. This work shows the generation of multimodal interfaces where a discourse model is transformed to different automatically rendered modalities. It supports loose coupling of the design of human-computer interaction and the integration of specific modalities. The presented communication platform utilizes this transformation process. It allows for high-level integration of input like speech, hand gesture and a WIMP-UI. The generation of output is possible with the modalities speech and GUI. Integration of other input; and output modalities is supported as well. Furthermore, the platform is applicable for several applications as well as different devices, e.g., PDAs and PCs.