Multimodal Interaction within Ambient Environments: An Exploratory Study

Inputs and outputs are not two independent phenomena in multimodal systems. This paper examines the relationship that exists between them. We present the results of a Wizard of Oz experiment which shows that output modalities used by the system have an influence on the Users' input modalities for a large category of users. The experiment took place in a smart room. This kind of environment does not require my particular knowledge about computers and their use and thus allowed US to study the behavior of ordinary people including subjects who are not familiar with computers. The experiment also shows that speech is a favorite modality within smart room environments for a large part of users. We think that the results presented in this paper will be useful for the design of intelligent multimodal systems.