An agent-based architecture for ubiquitous multimodal user interfaces

Abstract

Today's mobile world is made up of heterogeneous networks combined with various devices with different characteristics. Progressive users have the desire to utilize the same services and access the same information content on all their available devices. Therefore, an efficient way of providing user interfaces for multiple devices and their different modalities is needed. Current service development architectures, however, do not provide an easy approach for creating multimodal interfaces on different devices. Our agent-based architecture, the multi-access service platform, offers a flexible solution for ubiquitous service access. Using an abstract description of content and interactions, it is capable of generating user interfaces in languages such as HTML, WML, and VoiceXML. Therefore, our solution allows a heterogeneous landscape of devices to access an application server's mobile services. The paper concludes with the description of a mobile service we have implemented based on the multi-access service platform.