Spoken-Language Access to Multimedia (SLAM) : a multimodal interface to the World-Wide Web
David Thomas House · 1995
The World-Wide Web (WWW), a global networked information sytem based on hypertext, has become extremely popular since it became available in 1992. Inorder to improve the ease of access to the information available on the WWW, as well as to give increased exposure to spoken language systmes, we developed Spoken Language Access to Multimedia (SLAM), aspoken language extension to the graphical user interface of the World-Wide Web browser Mosaic. Although other reserach ahs been conducted on speech interfaces to hypertext, including speech interfaces to the WWW, SLAM differs in some key ways. For one, SLAM uses the complementary modalities of spoken language and direct manipulation to improce this interface to information on the Internet. Also, SLAM makes the advantages of spoken language systems available to a wider audience by providing a recognition server available remotely across a network. This thesis describes previous work related to SLAM, particularly in the area s of multimodality and speech interfaces to hypertext and hypermedia systems, including speech access to the WWW. This thesis also examines the issues and architecture of what is believed to be the first spoken-language interface to the WWW to be easily run across platforms.