<title>Multimedia browser (MMB)</title>

Abstract

Current well-known web browsers are limited to graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) that are geared towards an iconic or hieroglyphic system of communication. Modern speech-enabled user interfaces are built over GUIs and apply a 'Say What You See' (SWYS) paradigm. GUIs and SWYS fail to satisfy the user's need for natural language multimedia interfaces. The first voice based OS interfaces such as the Vocal/Auditory Multimedia Browser (VAMB) combined a spoken quasi-natural language input with a graphical display, audio and verbal output and supported a rudimentary browsing capability. The MultiMedia Browser (MMB) improves VAMB's speech recognition capabilities and includes a complete web browser with advanced page navigation. MMB applies a What You Say Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) paradigm that utilizes both an Associative Calculus Environment (ACE) and Dynamic Hierarchal Limited Vocabulary (DHLV). The associative calculus is a set of rules that specifies how sentences using the ACE syntax are to be interpreted relative to graphical displays. DHLV dynamically minimizes the contents of the vocabulary pool depending on the current multimedia configuration.