Loosely-coupled approach towards multi-modal browsing

Contemplating the concept of universal-access multi-modal browsing comes as one of the emerging “killer” technologies that promises broader and more flexible access to information, faster task completion, and advanced user experience. Inheriting the best from GUI and speech, based on the circumstances, hardware capabilities, and environment, multi-modality’s great advantage is to provide application developers with a scalable blend of input and output channels that may accommodate any user, device, and platform. This article describes a flexible multi-modal browser architecture, named Ferda the Ant, which reuses uni-modal browser technologies available for VoiceXML, WML, and HTML browsing. A central component, the Virtual Proxy, acts as a synchronization coordinator. This browser architecture can be implemented in either a single client configuration, or by distributing the browser components across the network. We have defined and implemented a synchronization protocol to communicate the changes occurring in the context of a component browser to the other browsers participating in the multi-modal browser framework. Browser wrappers implement the required synchronization protocol functionality at each of the component browsers. The component browsers comply with existing content authoring standards, and we have designed a set of markup-level authoring conventions that facilitate maintaining the browser synchronization .