Bypassing Bluetooth Device Discovery Using a Multimodal User Interface

A fixed Bluetooth transmitter can offer mobile services to people in proximity. However, the Bluetooth device discovery process introduces a significant delay, which impacts usability. A number of solutions have been proposed for bypassing device discovery; in this paper we propose a new technique leveraging multimodal user interfaces. In our approach, someone coming into range of proximity-based services reads a sign listing their names. The person starts a multimodal service browser, and speaks the name of a service. This name, plus the current location (e.g., at the granularity of the current cell tower identifier), is mapped into a Bluetooth address and an optional service identifier. The service browser then connects directly to the transmitter and service. We implemented this approach on handsets connecting into a commercial voice server over a 2G data network. The server-side Bluetooth service directory consisted of 5,727 unique service names. An experiment demonstrated a very good speech recognition rate, and confirmed that the overall time savings were equivalent to other techniques for bypassing Bluetooth device discovery. The multimodal approach also has significant cost and usability advantages.