Our current prototype, the Mobile Assistant(MA), gives users enhanced access to their personal information management (PIM) tools and data by giving them unified anytime/anywhere access. A unified messaging store (i.e voice mail in one's email inbox) is provided to give a single point of contact for all messaging. The conversational voice portal provides access to its unified message store, calendar, address book, and outbound dialing and fax capabilities. For those that are often out of the office, MA also provides personalized text message notification of messages, meetings, invitations and to-dos.

This project is addressing the issues of usability, personalization, contextual reasoning, streamlined communication of information, and multi-modality. To provided advanced usability we are utilizing the ViaVoice Natural Language Understanding (NLU) components to enable a walk-up-and-use interface. Along with an NLU interface comes a higher level of expectation from the user, thus the need for robust contextual reasoning and personalization. An ad hoc framework is in place today and we are working on a generalizable framework that can be used in other domains. Communicating large amounts of information over an audio channel is a challenge - to date, we have used document summarization to speed this communication, but we will also be looking to multi-modal/multi-device interfaces to enhance the user's interaction here.

Demo