Bringing context-aware access to the web through spoken interaction

Abstract

The web has become the largest repository of multimedia information and its convergence with telecommunications is now bringing the benefits of web technology to handheld devices. To optimize data access using these devices and provide services which meet the user needs through intelligent information retrieval, the system must sense and interpret the user environment and the communication context. In addition, natural spoken conversation with handheld devices makes possible the use of these applications in environments in which the use of GUI interfaces is not effective, provides a more natural human-computer interaction, and facilitates access to the web for people with visual or motor disabilities, allowing their integration and the elimination of barriers to Internet access. In this paper, we present an architecture for the design of context-aware systems that use speech to access web services. Our contribution focuses specifically on the use of context information to improve the effectiveness of providing web services by using a spoken dialog system for the user-system interaction. We also describe an application of our proposal to develop a context-aware railway information system, and provide a detailed evaluation of the influence of the context information in the quality of the services that are supplied.

A Proposal for Processing and Fusioning Multiple Information Sources in Multimodal Dialog Systems

“…Although the different methodologies proposed to develop the described modules integrated in the multimodal dialog system have been evaluated in previous works [21,23,24,11], as a future work we propose the application of the described framework to develop and evaluate a practical system in a real environment.…”

“…As described in [24], we propose the use of a Facilitator and Positioning Systems to acquire and process external contextual information. The Positioning System communicates with the ARUBA positioning system to extract and transmit positioning information to other agents in the system…”

Building multi-domain conversational systems from single domain resources

“…The third practical system that we have integrated for the practical application of our proposal provides tourist information for different cities in Spain [66] The information provided is related to interesting spots and monuments, restaurants and bars, theater listings, and movie showtimes. This information is retrieved from different web repositories, most of them updated daily.…”

A Caregiver Support Platform within the Scope of an Ambient Assisted Living Ecosystem

“…To support the context information, new software platforms were developed with the ability to process heterogeneous information [11]. …”

“… The rapid growth of the Web of Things, which leads to the integration of advanced features in even the most common devices, creating ubiquitous systems and allowing the use of high-level information trading, thus generating complex context information of the environment's events. To support the context information, new software platforms were developed with the ability to process heterogeneous information [ 11 ]. Adaptive user interfaces and user profile detection, allowing personalized information display and the automatic and seamless adaptation to different user constraints.…”