P1104      Multimodal multilingual information services for small mobile terminals (MUST)

The emerging mobile Internet capable terminals promise to offer a large number of new and appealing services. The small size of these terminals introduces usability problems for these services, and, therefore new interaction modes need to be developed. One of these is speech centric multimodal interaction. Speech recognition, pen, text are used at the input side and speech synthesis, graphics, text, and moving pictures are used at the output site. This document discusses the main issues in speech centric multimodal interfaces. For one thing, the pivotal role of ‘language’ creates the need for making most future services multilingual. An overview of present activities in the development of multimodal interfaces and some expectations for the near, mid-term and long-term future are given. The technical features are explained. To make new Mobile Internet services successful, a number of players will have to join forces: content providers, network and terminal suppliers, multimodal technology suppliers, and application developers. Since the growing use of mobile Internet is of interest for (mobile) network operators, they might want to join this chain, and even direct the developments. Only when the different players collaborate, standardised user-friendly interfaces can be developed that guarantee the acceptance and use by the large public.