A multimodal, networked dialogue system for access to entertainment

Today's consumer is faced with the task of navigating through a bewildering array of entertainment choices in the home. The traditional interfaces for accessing entertainment content (e.g., the handheld remote TV control) were not designed to cope with such a complex navigation task. Furthermore, such traditional interfaces present choices in a way that is quite different from the way in which the user thinks about the choices. We describe a prototype system for interactive TV control that illustrates a new paradigm for human-centered access to entertainment. The system is aided by knowledge about the consumer's preferences and past behavior, and by its access to information available on the Internet. We show how, by putting together a number of enabling technologies, a natural dialogue between the system and the consumer is achieved. The dialogue is mixed-mode; the system supports spoken input and output, and graphical and text output. Test users greatly preferred this mixed interface to a speech-only one, mainly because it leaves them in no doubt about the current state of the system. We believe the success of the approach adopted here shows how accessibility requirements may be met for many different types of consumer devices.