The coming millenium will be characterized by the availability of multiple information appliances that make ubiquitous information access an accepted fact of life. The ability to access and transform information via a multiplicity of appliances, each designed to suit the user's speci c usage environment, requires the exploitation of all available input and output modalities to maximize the band-width of man-machine communication. There will be an increasingly strong demand for devices that present the same set of functionalities when accessing and manipulating the information, independently of the access device. The resulting uniform interface must be inherently multi-modal and dialog driven. During this evolution, conventional phones will remain a major type of access device. Also, the clients will o er more and more complex functions on ever more miniaturized devices. Eventually, we need to use these devices while performing other activities, and therefore often in hands-free o...
Stéphane H. Maes, T. V. Raman