An Oral Interaction Control Method with Web pages by VXML Metadata Definition

In ubiquitous society, there will be a demand for enhancing the mechanism that allows the user to talk with PCs or mobile terminals connected to the Internet so that anyone can access the network and retrieve information regardless of where he or she is, and the aggravation of the digital divide can be prevented. In this paper, we propose a method of providing a voice interface for access to Web pages using a Web browser. Specifically, VoiceXML metadata, which contains an oral interaction scenario, is placed in the Web server along with the associated HTML data. Two alternative methods are considered for the client terminal to acquire this metadata: the built-in address method and the self-acquisition method. We have also developed a method of synchronizing oral interactions with the Web page display. We have built an experimental system, and used it to confirm that the proposed method operates as intended.