The Multimodal Interaction Activity seeks to extend the Web to allow users to dynamically select the most appropriate mode of interaction for their current needs including any disabilities in order to enable Web application developers to provide an effective user interface for whichever modes the user selects. With multimodal Web applications, users can provide input via speech, handwriting and keystrokes, with output presented via displays, pre-recorded and synthetic speech, audio, and tactile mechanisms such as mobile phone vibrators and Braille strips.
The goal of the Multimodal Interaction Activity is to clearly define how to author concrete multimodal Web applications, for example, coupling a local GUI (e.g., HTML user agent) with a remote Speech I/F (e.g., VoiceXML user agent). The Multimodal Interaction Working Group is important as a central point of coordination within W3C for multimodal activities, and the group collaborates with other related Working Groups, e.g. Voice Browser, Scalable Vector Graphics, Compound Document Formats, Web Applications and Ubiquitous Web Applications.
EMMA extensiotn, a.k.a, EMMA 2.0, promotes the development of rich Web applications that can be adapted to various input modes (such as handwriting, natural language, and gestures) as well as output modes (such as synthesized speech) at lower cost. Use Cases for Possible Future EMMA Features is published as a Working Group Note. on 15 December 2009.
The sixth Working Draft of Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces is published on 29 October 2009. The main changes from the previous draft are (1) clarifying the relationship to EMMA, (2) simplifying the architecture constituents, (3) adding a description on HTTP transport of lifecycle events and (4) adding an example of handwriting recognition modality component. Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML) 1.0 is published as a First Public Working Draft on 29 October 2009.
The group is wrapping up the Disposition of Comments for InkML and preparing for the second Last Call Working Draft since there are several substantive updates based on the comments. An Implementation Report Plan document is also being prepared in order to advance the specification to a Candidate Recommendation. There are already several known implementations of InkML, so there should be no big problem.
The group held a face to face meeting on November 5-6 collocated with the Voice Browser Working Group's meeting during the TPAC 2009 (W3C Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee Meetings Week) .
The group has formed a new "Voice on the Web" task force collaboratively with the Voice Browser Working Group in order to promote the use of voice and multimodality in web applications. This task force will be reaching out to other W3C Working Groups and the public to learn, educate and help develop Voice on the Web. For example, the group gave a presentation on the Voice Browser Working Group's work during the W3C Project Review on February 25 and discussed with the W3C Team how to get more Web developers involved in voice technology. Also a talk on "Voice and the Mobile Web" will be given on April 23 at the Mobile Voice Conference in San Francisco. And the group is planning a workshop on standardizing more 'conversational' approaches to speech recognition later in June.
5. We are working with the Voice Browser Working Group on ideas forThe group is discussing potential extensions for EMMA to support new features for multimodal applications in various environments. The discussion includes relationship with other W3C specifications like Media Fragments URI, Geolocation and EmotionML. The Emotion subgroup of the group is working with the EMMA subgroup on timestamp annotations and considering what kind of timing specification would be appropriate for emotion annotation to a video/audio fragment.
The group is preparing for the Candidate Recommendation of MMI Architecture and has started to generate assertions for the Implementation Report Plan document, and the second Last Call Working Draft of InkML will be published shortly.
There will be several presentations by the group participants at the Mobile Voice Conference in San Francisco including a presentation on "Distributed Multimodality in the MMI Architecture".
The group is organizing a workshop on "Conversational Applications" with the Voice Browser Working Group. The goal of the workshop is to collect use cases of conversational systems that motivate extensions to the W3C specifications that support human language processing, i.e., SRGS, SISR, PLS and SSML. Please see the Call for Participation for details. The workshop will be on 18-19 June 2010 in NJ, USA, hosted by Openstream. The Voice Browser Working Group and the Multimodal Interaction Working Group will also hold face to face meetings colocated with the workshop.
| Group | Chair | Team Contact | Charter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Multimodal Interaction Working Group (participants) | Deborah Dahl | Kazuyuki Ashimura | Chartered until 31 March 2011 |
This Activity Statement was prepared for the November 2011 TPAC 2011 (Members only) per section 5 of the W3C Process Document. Generated from group data.
Kazuyuki Ashimura, Multimodal Interaction Activity Lead
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