Multi-modal e-Business

We first introduce some terminology. The term channel is used in this paper to denote a particular renderer, device, or a particular modality. Multi-channel applications are applications designed for ubiquitous access through different channels, one channel at a time. No particular attention is paid to synchronization or coordination across different channels. Multi-modal applications are multi-channel applications, where multiple channels are simultaneously available and synchronized. From a multi-channel point of view, multi-modality can be considered as another channel. Conversational applications are applications supporting multi-modal, free flow interactions (mixed initiative dialogs) within applications and across independently developed applications, and using short term and long term context (including previous input and output) to disambiguate and understand the user’s intention. Typically, such application makes use of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) [9]. In the rest of this paper, we assume that multi-modal platforms will evolve to progressively encompass conversational capabilities as the underlying technologies improve. It is also worth noting that the conventional understanding of multi-modality is changing over time. For example, it is now widely accepted that large screen graphical output, keyboard and mouse input constitute the GUI user interface while being clearly multi-modal. As platforms and tools are designed to seamless design applications that integrate these different modalities and applications become widely available, we do not distinguish them any more as multi-modal. They rather become a well understood and well accepted composite modality. Note that there are no fundamental differences between multiple devices and multiple modalities. 2