A middleware for conversational user interfaces in mobile environments

Conversational User Interfaces model aspects of natural interaction and provide a new metaphor for Human Computer Interaction. The combination of natural aspects with usual interaction methods offers to attain a more comfortable interaction behavior. To deploy the full potential of the conversational approach a system has to provide multimodal features and dialog planning. The functionality needed for conversational requests can be encapsulated in a middleware which offers an abstract description for the dialog process and methods to synchronize different modalities. Our realization of such a system is described within this Paper. The presented multimodal user interface system uses a dialog description language. This language describes interaction independent from specific modalities. The associated interpreter provides a plug-in interface for different interaction engines and it synchronizes them for an appropriate behavior. The integration of a Conversation Engine was also done within the MAP-project where this approach has been tested.