Towards mobile multimodal telecommunications systems and services

The communication itself is considered as a multimodal interactive process binding speech with other modalities. In this contribution some results of the project MobilTel (Mobile Multimodal Telecommunications System) are presented. It has provided a research framework resulting in a development of mobile terminal (PDA) based multimodal interface, enabling user to obtain information from internet by multimodal way through wireless telecommunication network. The MobilTel communicator is a speech centric multimodal system with speech interaction capabilities in Slovak language supplemented with graphical modalities. The graphical modalities are pen touch screen interaction, keyboard, and display on which the information is more user friendly presented, and provides hyperlink and scrolling menu availability. The architecture of the MobilTel communicator and methods of interaction between PDA and MobilTel communicator are described. The graphical examples of services that enable users to obtain information about weather or information about train connection are also presented.